Names used by its speakers (Endonyms): Zhōngwén (中文); Hànyǔ (汉语 in simplified characters, 漢語 in traditional characters)
Native speakers (estimated): 990 million (Mandarin only); 1.39 billion including all varieties
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 1.2 billion (Mandarin only)
Where it’s spoken: Chinese is collectively a group of languages spoken originally by people of the Han Chinese ethnic majority. Mandarin Chinese is by far the most widely spoken version of Chinese and is the official language of the People’s Republic of China as well as the de facto primary language of Taiwan, though in both countries there are also millions of native speakers of non-Mandarin dialects. In Singapore, Mandarin is one of four official languages (alongside English, Malay, and Tamil). While Chinese is co-official in Hong Kong (with English) and Macau (with Portuguese), the predominant form of the language in both those special regions is Cantonese.
Elsewhere in Asia, several different dialects are spoken within Malaysia’s large Chinese community, though Mandarin predominates. Mandarin is also the de facto working language of Wa State, a region of Myanmar (Burma) along the border with China. Thailand has the next highest percentage of ethnic Chinese (14%) after Singapore and Malaysia, and indeed the largest Chinese community worldwide outside of China and Taiwan, but they are highly assimilated and overwhelmingly speak Thai rather than any version of Chinese.
Waves of emigration have brought the Chinese diaspora to nearly every part of the globe. The largest community outside Asia is found in the United States, where there are 5 million Americans of Chinese descent, over 3 million of whom report speaking one of the Chinese languages, making it the third most common home language (after Spanish). Earlier generations of immigrants mostly spoke Cantonese or Toisanese (another dialect from South China), while Mandarin has become increasingly predominant with recent arrivals. In terms of non-English languages for study in the US, while Chinese doesn’t come close to the popularity of Spanish or French, it has been reported as the sixth most commonly studied—after German, Japanese, and either Latin (in high schools) or ASL (in universities).
In Canada, about 5% of the population is of Chinese heritage, concentrated primarily around Toronto and Vancouver, and representing the second-largest group of Asian Canadians. Chinese language (all types, but Cantonese more than Mandarin) is reported as the most common mother tongue after English and French.
While Australians of Chinese descent may number slightly fewer than Canadians, by percentage of population (6%) their numbers are higher than any other country beyond Asia. The majority of Chinese Australians report speaking Chinese at home, predominantly Mandarin, making it the second most widely spoken native language besides English.
Smaller, though still significant ethnic Chinese communities also exist in South Korea, Japan, France, the UK, Italy, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and New Zealand; the extent of spoken Chinese in each these countries varies widely.
Language family: Sino-Tibetan family, Sinitic branch. Believe it or not… but it’s the largest language in its family.
Related languages include: The Sino-Tibetan language family is considered to include Burmese (with 33 million speakers) and Tibetan (with 6 million), but over 94% of Sino-Tibetan speakers call some form of Chinese their first language. This alone is enough to make the family the second largest (after Indo-European) by number of native speakers. The remaining Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in the Himalayas and mountainous areas of Southeast Asia, but in small and often isolated communities. Of the 22 languages officially recognized by the Indian government, two are Sino–Tibetan but account for only 0.3% of the population, combined.
Speaking of related languages… there’s a great deal of variety within the Chinese language itself. In fact, opinions differ as to whether different types of spoken Chinese should properly be considered ‘dialects’ versus separate languages. They all descend from the same original spoken and written language more than 2,500 years ago—but this is equally true of the Romance languages and Latin. China’s long history of (mostly) political and cultural unity over those millennia, in contrast with the fall of the Roman Empire, may be responsible for the persistence of the view of Chinese as one language. Though the two best-known types of spoken Chinese are Mandarin (990 million native speakers) and Cantonese (or Yue, with 85 million native speakers), there are at least seven main dialect groups which are not mutually intelligible. Other groups include Wu, which includes Shanghainese; Min, which includes Fuzhou, Hokkien and Teochew dialects; and Hakka.
Writing and pronunciation tips: Famously, Chinese is the only major world language to still use a pictographic rather than phonetic-based writing system. (Phonetic scripts exist, but mostly for the benefit of language learners or non-speakers; Pinyin written with the Latin alphabet is an example.) Chinese writing originated with pictographs at least 3,000 years ago, which first broadened to include ideographs, and then added further variety as simple characters and elements were combined to form increasingly complex compound characters. Regardless of how many strokes that a character contains—from one to as many as 33(!)—each character represents only one syllable, and takes up the same (roughly square) space on the page.
Some compound characters are created based on a fusion of meaning—for instance, tree 木 + tree 木 = forest 林. Even more characters include one element that relates to the meaning or category of the word (usually on the left) plus a second element that suggests the sound (usually on the right)—so Chinese writing does technically contain phonetic elements, but haphazardly so. An example is ‘ocean’ 洋 = which is ‘water’ 水 (also written as three short strokes シ) + ‘sheep’ 羊 … because ‘ocean’ and ‘sheep’ both happen to be pronounced “yáng”. Other examples aren’t pronounced identically, but at least rhyme: the character ‘school’ 校 is pronounced “xiào”—and consists of ‘tree or wood’ 木 (because…schools are made of wood?) + ‘intersect or meet’ 交 (pronounced “jiāo”). Okay, it’s not a perfect system, and still comes down to a great deal of memorization.