Mandarin Chinese (pŭtōnghuà, guóyŭ, huáyŭ)

Introduction

Mandarin is a Category III language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English.

Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese dialects. It is spoken as a first language in a vast area of northern and southwestern mainland China. It is also spoken in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Viet Nam. The total number of first-language speakers of Mandarin world-wide is estimated to be around 873 million (Ethnologue). The major Mandarin-speaking areas are listed below.

 

Mainland China	867 million 1st-language and 178 million 2nd-language speakers
Taiwan	4.3 million 1st-language and 15 million 2nd-language speakers
Malaysia and Singapore	618,000
Indonesia	460,000

Status

• Mainland China and Taiwan
  Standard Mandarin is the official language of mainland China and Taiwan where it serves as a lingua franca for speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Standard Mandarin is used in all spheres of informal and formal communication. It serves as the medium of instruction at all educational levels as well as in all media. The use of Standard Mandarin has facilitated communication among people who speak a variety of mutually unintelliglble dialects and languages. As a result, Standard Mandarin is now spoken with varying degrees of fluency by most people in mainland China and in Taiwan.
• SingaporeStandard Mandarin is one of the four official languages of Singapore along with English, Tamil and Malay. Although English is the primary medium of instruction in primary schools, Chinese, Tamil, and Malay are taught in schools of the respective language communities. Schools in the Chinese community receive extra funding to teach Mandarin and to use it as a medium of instruction since the majority of ethnic Chinese in Singapore are speakers of Min dialects and have to learn Mandarin as a second dialect.

--From "aboutworldlanguages"