The story
From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation for 普通話／普通话 (Pǔtōnghuà, literally “common speech”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
putonghua
Today it means: Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China; the state-designated national speech of the Han nationality using Beijing pronunciation as the standard pronunciation, Beijing speech as the basic dialect, and the model writing of the modern vernacular prose as the norm for grammar. Full definition →