Chinese

About Chinese

Chinese is not one spoken language but a family of related languages, with about 1.3 billion speakers in all. The largest by far is Mandarin, whose standard form is the official language of China and Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. Others include Cantonese in Hong Kong and Guangdong and Hokkien in Fujian, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Speakers of these languages often cannot understand each other in speech, but they largely share the same written characters.

Most guides in this category give Mandarin, and some also give the Cantonese form. For the other Chinese languages, see the Cantonese and Hokkien categories. Chinese is written in characters, simplified in mainland China and Singapore and traditional in Taiwan and Hong Kong. All the Chinese languages are tonal, so the same syllable said with a different pitch is a different word.

FamilySino-Tibetan, Chinese
Speakersabout 1.3 billion, all Chinese languages together
Largest languageMandarin
Official inChina, Taiwan, Singapore (standard Mandarin)
ScriptChinese characters, simplified and traditional
Codeszh (ISO 639-1), zho (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue, via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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