Mandarin · 中文

About Mandarin

Language family

Sino-Tibetan, Sinitic

Where it's spoken

Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore

Speakers

roughly 920 million native speakers and over 1.1 billion total

Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and was promoted as a national standard in China and Taiwan during the 20th century to unify a country with dozens of mutually unintelligible spoken varieties. Those varieties, including Cantonese and Wu, share a common written tradition through Chinese characters even where speech is not mutually intelligible. Mandarin is tonal, uses no alphabet, and is written with logographic characters, some in continuous use for over 3,000 years.