page_title: Mandarin Chinese
hierarchical_section_title: Mandarin Chinese
context_page_description: Mandarin Chinese or simply Mandarin is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used.
  Mandarin is one of five major regional languages of China. It spreads wider than any other regional variety, from the whole northern part of China to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of China. In that big area there are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan could not understand people there who were speaking their own dialect, Yunnanhua. The problem is bigger than for a person in Great Britain or the United States to go to Australia. Therefore, starting in the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the Beijing dialect and on the most widely understood words and pronunciations.
  Mandarin is a standard language. It is nobody's native language, but a good average between various language forms and a common language everyone can understand and communicate with. Although it is based on the Beijing dialect, it is not the same as Beijing dialect.
context_section_description: Mandarin Chinese or simply Mandarin (/ˈmændərɪn/ (listen); simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally: "speech of officials") is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used.
  Mandarin is one of five major regional languages of China. It spreads wider than any other regional variety, from the whole northern part of China to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of China. In that big area there are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan could not understand people there who were speaking their own dialect, Yunnanhua. The problem is bigger than for a person in Great Britain or the United States to go to Australia. Therefore, starting in the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the Beijing dialect and on the most widely understood words and pronunciations.
  Mandarin is a standard language. It is nobody's native language, but a good average between various language forms and a common language everyone can understand and communicate with. Although it is based on the Beijing dialect, it is not the same as Beijing dialect.
  Schools use a dialect called Standard Mandarin, Putonghua (普通话/普通話) meaning "common (spoken) language" or Hanyu (汉语/漢語) meaning "language of the Han". In places such as Malaysia, it is known as Huayu (华语/華語). In Taiwan, it is known as Guoyu (国语/國語) meaning "national language." There are some minor differences in these standards.
  Mandarin is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language. Most people emigrating from the Greater China region now speak Mandarin, while in past centuries most spoke Cantonese or Taishanese, another local Chinese dialect.
  Standard Mandarin is one of the six official languages at the United Nations. The others are English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic.
caption: Guānhuà (Mandarin)
  written in Chinese characters