As a language family Chinese has an estimated
nearly 1.2 billion speakers; Mandarin Chinese
alone has around 851 million native speakers,
outnumbering any other language in the world.
Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high
level of internal diversity, though all spoken
varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic.
There are between six and twelve main regional
groups of Chinese (depending on classification
scheme), of which the most populous (by far) is
Mandarin (c. 850 million), followed by Wu (c.
90 million), Min (c. 70 million) and
Cantonese (c. 70 million). Most of these groups
are mutually unintelligible, though some, like
Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may
share common terms and some degree of
intelligibility.
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin "普通话/普通話 (pinyin: pǔtōnghùa); 国语/國語 (pinyin gúoyǔ)", based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the Peoples Republic of China , the Republic of China in Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore . Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations . Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau .