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This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic , other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. [ 1 ]
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 ...
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] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Mandarin is spoken across northern and southwestern China, with some pockets in neighbouring countries. Unlike their compatriots on the southeast coast, few Mandarin speakers engaged in overseas emigration until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of them in cities across the world. [39]
[33] [35] However, Mandarin is becoming increasingly more prevalent due to the opening up of the PRC. [35] In New York City in 2002, Mandarin was spoken as a native language by only 10% of Chinese speakers, but was used as an auxiliary language among the greatest number of them and was predicted to replace Cantonese as their lingua franca. [36]
Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan when the Kuomintang took over control from Japan after World War II. In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the Chinese Proficiency Test. [1] For comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004. [2]
Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese language today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it the most spoken first language in the world and second most spoken overall. [2]
Mandarin Chinese is the prestige language in practice, and failure to protect ethnic languages does occur. In summer 2020, the Inner Mongolian government announced an education policy change to phase out Mongolian as the language of instructions for humanities in elementary and middle schools, adopting the national instruction material instead.