Languages
Native
Mandarin Chinese
70%
Secondary languages
English
12%
Language Samples
你好，你怎么样？
Nǐ hǎo, nǐ zěnme yàng?
Hello, how are you?
我很好，谢谢。
Wǒ hěn hǎo, xièxiè.
I am very well, thank you.
一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十
Yī, èr, sān, sì, wǔ, liù, qī, bā, jiǔ, shí
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Mandarin Chinese, known as Pǔtōnghuà (普通话, 'common speech'), belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family and has the largest number of native speakers of any language on Earth. Written Chinese has been used continuously for over 3,000 years, making it one of the oldest living writing systems. The logographic script — Chinese characters — was simplified in the 1950s by the People's Republic of China to improve literacy, while Traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. China's extraordinary linguistic diversity includes dozens of mutually unintelligible regional varieties often called 'dialects', though many are linguistically distinct languages.
Similar Languages
Cantonese
50%
Wu (Shanghainese)
45%
Japanese (written loanwords)
60%
Tibetan
28%
Media
Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui province, a cultural symbol that has inspired Chinese poetry and calligraphy for centuries.
Photo: Chi King · CC BY 2.0
Did You Know
01
Mandarin is a tonal language with four tones plus a neutral tone — the same syllable 'mā, má, mǎ, mà' means mother, hemp, horse, and scold respectively.
02
Chinese characters are logograms, not an alphabet — literate Chinese adults typically know 3,000–5,000 characters, while a full dictionary contains over 50,000.
03
Despite vast regional dialect diversity, all varieties of Chinese share the same written script, allowing readers across China to communicate in writing even if they cannot understand each other when speaking.