MANDARIN FACTS

Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers of any language in the world – almost one billion.

The language is the national language in China and Taiwan and one of four national languages in Singapore.

Mandarin Chinese is written with the Chinese characters writing system, with either simplified or traditional characters.

It has been used as the national language of China since the 14th century and comes from the country’s northern region.

The language is so dominant in the Chinese world that speakers of other dialects and regional languages gravitate towards learning Mandarin Chinese to communicate with as many people as possible. In a nutshell, Mandarin Chinese is to the East what English is to the West.

With almost one billion native speakers, Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers than any other language in the world. To put that into perspective, the entire population of the US is only a third of that – at 314 million people.

Although the Chinese character writing system can be used to represent many languages, Mandarin Chinese is written using Chinese characters, which is important to note as this is not an alphabet-based writing system.