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Ethnologue (2024) [] Ethnologue lists the following languages as having 50 million or more total speakers. [ 4 ] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing several varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese. Most spoken languages, Ethnologue, 2024 [ 4 ]
'Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages [d] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. [3] Ying, a speaker of Henan Chinese
There are several hundred languages in China.The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
The following is a list of countries and territories where Chinese is an official language.While those countries or territories that designate any variety of Chinese as an official language, as the term "Chinese" is considered a group of related language varieties rather than a homogeneous language, of which many are not mutually intelligible, in the context of the spoken language such ...
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. [4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5]
Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. [6] Around 2004, over 2 million Americans spoke varieties of Chinese, with ...
People in many Mandarin-speaking areas may use different initial sounds where Beijing uses initial r-/ɻ/. Common variants include /j/, /l/, /n/ and /w/. [96] Some dialects have initial /ŋ/ corresponding to the zero initial of the standard language. [96] This initial is the result of a merger of the Middle Chinese zero initial with /ŋ/ and /ʔ/.
The Chinese government's current goal is to have 85% of the country's population speak Standard Chinese by 2025, and virtually the entire country by 2035. [50] Throughout the country, Standard Chinese has heavily influenced local languages through diglossia , replacing them entirely in some cases, especially among younger people in urban areas.