Chinese and Mandarin – Are they the same Chinese language?

For many people who want to learn Chinese, it is confusing when they learn that what they are about to learn is “Mandarin”. What is Mandarin? Is it a different language other than Chinese? Or, are Chinese and Mandarin the same language?

Indeed, these are very meaningful questions.

Chinese vs Mandarin

For non-Chinese people, the language spoken in China is Chinese. For Chinese people, there are different dialects spoken in different regions. People from different regions do not understand each other when they speak the dialects. The most common dialects (languages) are Mandarin and Cantonese.

Due to the political and social reasons, despite the differences among Chinese dialects, Chinese is considered to be a single language used in China. Chinese is an umbrella covering all the languages spoken in China, which includes Mandarin, Cantonese and much more.

Mandarin, on the other hand, a translation of 官话 （speech of officials), is a group of varieties of Chinese dialects. Chinese people speak this dialect in different regions across most of northern and southwestern areas in China. Beijing dialect, a member of this group, is the basis of standard Mandarin (普通话). In English, “Mandarin” refers to the standard language of Chinese.

Standard Chinese – Mandarin

70% of all Chinese speakers speak Mandarin. It is by far the largest Chinese dialect among the different dialect groups. Chinese speakers from the southwest to Northwest and Northeast all speak Mandarin. In addition, as the standard Chinese language, all students in schools learn Mandarin in China. For this reason, it is the most spoken Chinese dialect in China.

Although there is only one term – “Chinese”- in English, there are two terms in Chinese:  汉语 refers to its spoken form  and 中文 refers to its written form.

Standard Chinese has different names in different regions: 普通话 in mainland China, 国语 in Taiwan and 华语 in Singapore. Mandarin is a standardized form of spoken Chinese. It is the official language of China and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

In summary, there are many different dialects in China; Mandarin is actually one dialect. As the standard form of Chinese spoken language, students learn Mandarin in schools in China and abroad. Since Mandarin is the official language of China, when we say we learn Chinese, we actually mean Mandarin Chinese.

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