Chinese (language)

Chinese
汉语; 漢語 or 中文 Hànyǔ or Zhōngwén
Hànyǔ (Chinese) written in traditional (top), simplified (middle) characters and alternative name (bottom)
Native to	China, Taiwan, Singapore
Ethnicity	Han Chinese
Native speakers	(1.2 billion cited 1984–2001)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese
Early forms	Old Chinese Middle Chinese Chinese
Standard forms	Standard Mandarin Standard Cantonese
Dialects	Mandarin Jin Wu (incl. Shanghainese, Suzhounese and Wenzhounese) Huizhou Gan Xiang Min (incl. Amoy, Teochew and Fuzhou) Hakka Yue (incl. Cantonese and Taishanese) Ping
Writing system	Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese Transcriptions: Bopomofo Pinyin Xiao'erjing Dungan
Official status
Official language in	Cantonese as official  Hong Kong  Macau Mandarin as official  China  Singapore  Taiwan
Regulated by	National Commission on Language and Script Work (China) National Languages Committee (Taiwan) Civil Service Bureau (Hong Kong) Promote Mandarin Council (Singapore) Chinese Language Standardisation Council (Malaysia)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
ISO 639-2	(B)  (T)
ISO 639-3	– inclusive code Individual codes: cdo – Min Dong cjy – Jinyu cmn – Mandarin cpx – Pu Xian czh – Huizhou czo – Min Zhong gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Yue och – Old Chinese ltc – Late Middle Chinese lzh – Classical Chinese
Glottolog	sini1245
Linguasphere	79-AAA
Map of the Sinophone world Legend:   Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative, or native language   Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers   Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers   Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers   Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers   Major Chinese-speaking settlements
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Legend:

Chinese (汉语/漢語; Hànyǔ or 中文; Zhōngwén) is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world's population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language.

The varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, but may be even more varied. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (about 960 million), followed by Wu (80 million), Min (70 million), and Yue (60 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. All varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic.

Standard Chinese (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard language (中文; Zhōngwén), based on the logograms known as Chinese characters (汉字/漢字; Hànzì), is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects.