Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world with an estimated 1.1 billion speakers. Although Mandarin is spoken all over the world, it is spoken primarily in Asia, specifically in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. It is the official language of mainland China and Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore and the United Nations. 

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During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), Mandarin became the language of the ruling class in China. However, because of China’s size and the existence of many Chinese dialects, Mandarin was not adopted as the official language of China until 1909 by the Qing Dynasty. 

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Today, because of China’s size and long history, there are seven modern recognized dialects of Chinese spoken in China. For example, Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong. A Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker may not be able to understand each other, but they are united by China’s written language, or characters. There are approximately 50,000 Chinese characters; however, the average educated individual will know only about 8,000 of them. Chinese characters originated from the practice of using pictographs in China more than two thousand years ago. Today, the characters are not necessarily pictures of the words they express, but each character represents a word or part of a word. 

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Mandarin is part of the Chinese language family and the larger Sino-Tibetan language group. All Chinese languages are tonal languages. The meanings of words can change depending on how they are pronounced or the tone in which they are said. Chinese languages can have up to ten different tones. Spoken Chinese languages consist of mostly monosyllabic words. Because of this fact, they rely on tone for distinction among words. Mandarin Chinese uses four tones—level, rising, falling, and high-rising—to distinguish words or syllables that have the same series of consonants and vowels but different meanings. For example, depending on a speaker’s tone of voice, the word “ma” in Mandarin when spoken could mean either “mother” (mā) if it is a spoken with first tone (a level and higher pitch) or “horse” if it is spoken with a third tone (a falling rising pitch). Obviously, tone is important when speaking Mandarin because you would not want to call your mother a horse!

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Because Mandarin is a tonal language and its written form has thousands of characters, it is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. However, learning Chinese may be a sound investment in your future because it may soon become the language of business. The Chinese economy is the second largest economy in the world, in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), second only to the United States; and China is the largest manufacturer and exporter of goods to the world. As a Mandarin speaker, you will be able to communicate with more than a billion people. Therefore, the benefits of learning Mandarin are far greater than the challenges it presents. Mandarin is offered by Avenues Online as a global language option.