It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China.

By the late imperial period, local varieties of Chinese had diverged to the extent that people from different provinces could not understand one another.

In contrast, Yùchí Zhìpíng and Weldon South Coblin hold that the two readings reflect different versions of 15th-century standard speech.

[...] The Quonhoa dialect is now in vogue among the cultured classes, and is used between strangers and the inhabitants of the province they may visit.The missionaries recognized the utility of this standard language, and embarked on its study.

[14] In 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation.

[16] As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on the lower Yangtze koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence.

[22] In comparison with Shin's standard readings, the major changes in the late Ming language that were described by European missionaries were the loss of the voiced initials and the merger of [-m] finals with [-n].

However several words that appear in the more broadly-based written vernacular of the Qing and earlier periods are absent from early accounts of standard speech.

These include such now-common words as hē 喝 'to drink', hěn 很 'very', suǒyǒude 所有的 'all, whatsoever' and zánmen 咱們 'we (inclusive)'.