The Mandarin Chinese language
and how it is written

Where Mandarin Chinese ranks

Mandarin Chinese is the 2nd most-spoken language in the world by total speakers ^[1,2]. Here it is among its neighbours in the ranking, on one scale.

“How are you?” in Mandarin Chinese

The design of Chinese characters

Each character writes one syllable and one unit of meaning, so the script maps onto morphemes rather than sounds. Characters fit a square, and most combine a meaning component (radical) with a sound component^[5,4]. Mainland China and Singapore use the simplified forms introduced in the 1950s^[3].

Logographic. Each character writes a word or meaningful part of one.

Kind

Logographic

Direction

Left to right

Took shape

Oracle-bone inscriptions date from the Shang dynasty, around 1200 BCE; simplified forms from the 1950s

Line of descent

Oracle-bone script → Bronze script → Seal script → Clerical script → Regular script → Simplified

Traditional surface

Scrolls

Own digits

〇 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九

Also writes

吴语 Wu Chinese

• Everything fits a square

  Whether a character has one stroke or thirty, it occupies the same square cell, which is why Chinese text sets in a perfect grid with no word spaces^[5].

• Meaning plus sound

  Most characters are built from a semantic part and a phonetic part: 妈 (mā, mother) pairs 女 'woman' with 马 (mǎ), borrowed for its sound^[5].

• One code, many countries

  Unicode encodes a character shared by Chinese, Japanese and Korean once (Han unification), and the font decides the regional shape, which is why the same text can look subtly different in Tokyo and Beijing^[5].

• Four tones, four marks

  Pinyin marks Mandarin's four tones over the vowel: mā (mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse), mà (scold). Same letters, four words^[3].

• A shared written language

  A newspaper in Shanghai and one in Beijing can be read by speakers of both cities even though their speech is mutually unintelligible, because the characters carry meaning rather than sound^[4].

Mandarin Chinese is also written in Chinese characters (traditional).

Explore the letters

Numbers in Chinese characters

Mandarin Chinese's relatives among the 38

Mandarin Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family (Sinitic). These are the other languages with 50 million or more speakers in the same family; the closest — in the same branch — come first.

• 粵語Cantonese (Yue Chinese)Same branch: Sinitic · 86M
• 吴语Wu ChineseSame branch: Sinitic · 83M

Mandarin Chinese across the hub

The main page compares all 38 languages. Each link opens it on Mandarin Chinese.

• Preview it in the explorer →with all 38 side by side
• Hear it in the voice tour →“How are you?” in every language, spoken in turn
• Trace its script's family tree →from the first alphabets and Chinese oracle bones
• Compare its digits →ten ways to write 0–9
• See its share of speakers →an interactive breakdown by script, family and region

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Modern Standard Chinese language
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Chinese languages
5. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 18: East Asia (Han, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul)
6. Omniglot — Useful phrases in Mandarin Chinese

Checked October 25, 2026. Speaker numbers are Ethnologue's 2026 estimates, which count each language separately (Arabic and Chinese varieties are listed one by one). Maps shade whole countries, not regions within them. Found an error? Tell us.