The official language of China is Putonghua (Standard Chinese). Literal meaning “ordinary language” or “common language”. In western world Putonghua is also known as Mandarin. Actually Mandarin refers to the Northern Dialect of Chinese language, spoken by about 80 % of Chinese population. Besides Northern Dialect (Mandarin), the 2nd most spoken dialect is Yue, a.k.a. Cantonese. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica “There are three variants of Mandarin—Beijing, Chengdu, and Nanjing. Of these, the Beijing dialect is the most widespread Chinese tongue and has officially been adopted as the basis for the national language” (Britannica 2023). Standard Chinese or Putonghua belongs to the Sino-Tibetan languages. It uses his own written system – Chinese characters (hanzi). People in mainland China use Simplified Chinese characters and in Taiwan they use Traditional Chinese characters. Standard Chinese is a tonal language with five tones – four different modulations of the voice and one position without any modulation. The same phonetical complex may have multiple meanings depending on how it is pronounced. Hanyu Pinyin or Pinyin is the official romanization system used as phonetic alphabet in Chinese language (to show the pronunciation of the character); to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters.
When you see Chinese name written in Pinyin keep in mind that some of the letters have specific pronunciation (see Table 1 below):
Letter |
Pronunciation |
Letter |
pronunciation |
letter |
pronunciation |
C |
t͡sʰ (like “dt’s” in Shmidt's) |
z |
t͡s (like “ds” in hands ) |
J |
t͡ɕ (like “j” in jeep but tongue is positioned below lower teeth) |
Q |
t͡ɕʰ (like “ch” in cheat) |
X |
ɕ (like “s” in see) |
R |
ɻ - only in the “er” syllable (like English “r”) ʐ (like “g” in genre) |
Y |
J (like “y” in yes) |
Ong |
Uŋ |
(y)ian |
Ien |
* In written Pinyin the letter “i” after z, c, s, zh, ch, sh and r has no sound
Relevant statistics about Standard Chinese:
- about 920 million native speakers (L1) and over 200 million L2 speakers
- official language in People’s Republic of China and Singapore
- 80.72% of China’s population uses Standard Chinese. More than 95% of the literate population can correctly use standard Chinese characters (MOE 2022)
- the world’s most spoken language by number of native speakers (Ethnologue 2022)
- the world’s 2nd most spoken language by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2022)
- one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN 2023)
- one of the two official languages of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO 2023)
- one of the twelve official languages of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN 2023)
- fewer than 10 million Chinese, or less than 1% of the population, speak English (Song 2022).
- EF's English Proficiency Index 2018 ranks China at Low Proficiency (Song 2022).