Standard Mandarin

Standard Chinese
Modern Standard Mandarin
普通話 / 普通话 Pǔtōnghuà 國語 / 国语 Guóyǔ 華語 / 华语 Huáyǔ
Native to	China, Taiwan, Singapore
Native speakers	(has begun acquiring native speakers cited 1988, 2014) L2 speakers: 7% of China (2014)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Chinese Mandarin Beijing Mandarin Standard Chinese
Early forms	Middle Mandarin Standard Chinese
Writing system	Traditional Chinese Simplified Chinese Mainland Chinese Braille Taiwanese Braille Two-Cell Chinese Braille
Signed forms	Wenfa Shouyu
Official status
Official language in	China (as Putonghua)  Taiwan (as Guoyu)  Singapore (as Huayu)  Hong Kong (de facto)  Macau (de facto)  United Nations Shanghai Cooperation Organisation  Myanmar (Wa State)
Regulated by	National Language Regulating Committee (China) National Languages Committee (Taiwan) Promote Mandarin Council (Singapore) Chinese Language Standardisation Council (Malaysia)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
ISO 639-6	goyu (Guoyu) huyu (Huayu) cosc (Putonghua)
Glottolog	None
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Standard Chinese, also known as Modern Standard Mandarin, Standard Mandarin, or simply Mandarin, is a standard variety of Chinese that is the sole official language of both China and Taiwan, and also one of the four official languages of Singapore. Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese.

Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object word order. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants and tones than southern varieties. Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words.

There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan. Aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters (plus Hanyu Pinyin romanization for teaching), while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters (plus Bopomofo for teaching). There are many characters that are identical between the two systems.