Mandarin language

Mandarin is spoken across most of Northern and Southwestern China. Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups, spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area, stretching from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. This is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Most Mandarin varieties have four tones.

Mandarin is spoken by over 920 million people (2017). Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is used as one of the working languages of the United Nations.[6] It is also one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally and the most commonly taught Chinese variety with it being the language registered for education in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, Taipei and Singapore.