Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin
官话; 官話; Guānhuà
Guānhuà (Mandarin) written in Chinese characters (traditional Chinese on the left, simplified Chinese on the right)
Region	Most of northern and southwestern China (see also Standard Chinese)
Native speakers	960 million (2010)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin
Early forms	Old Chinese Middle Chinese Old Mandarin Mandarin
Standard forms	Standard Chinese (Putonghua, Guoyu)
Dialects	Northeastern Beijing Ji–Lu Jiao–Liao Lower Yangtze Central Plains Lan–Yin Southwestern Jin (sometimes a separate group) Huizhou (disputed)
Writing system	Traditional Chinese Simplified Chinese Cyrillic (Dungan alphabet) Xiao'erjing Mainland Chinese Braille Taiwanese Braille Two-Cell Chinese Braille Pinyin Zhuyin
Signed forms	Wenfa Shouyu
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	mand1415
Linguasphere	79-AAA-b
Mandarin area in China, with Jin (sometimes treated as a separate group) in light green
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Mandarin (ⁱ/ˈmændᵊrɪn/; simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally: "speech of officials") is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese. Because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects (北方话; běifānghuà). Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in any list of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly a billion).