Chinese language services

While you’re here… Some quite interesting facts about the Chinese language.

Chinese is an umbrella term to describe various languages. Accounting for 70% of Chinese speakers, Mandarin is more widely spoken than any other form of Chinese – with some 955 million native speakers globally. That’s 14% of the world’s total population. In fact, there are more native Mandarin speakers in the world than speakers of any other language. Mandarin is just one of several Chinese dialect groups, which can be kind of confusing. In places like Taiwan and People’s Republic of China it’s the official language. Mandarin dialects are spoken throughout most of northern and southwestern China. Despite their similarities, some Mandarin dialects are actually not “mutually intelligible”. Other varieties of Chinese include Wu, Xiang, Yue, Min, Hakka and Gan. It is written using traditional characters. Written using simplified characters, Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of the Chinese language spoken around Canton (Guangzhou) and its vicinity in southeastern China. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi, being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta. It is the dominant and official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and throughout the Western world.

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