About 1.3 billion people (one-fifth of the world) speak some form of Chinese, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language in the largest part of mainland China and Taiwan, one of the four in Singapore, and an official idiom of the United Nations. In the form of Standard Cantonese (66 million speakers), Chinese is spoken in GuangDong province and is one of the two official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and Macau (together with Portuguese).

The terms and concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those used in the West, partly because of the unifying effects of the Chinese characters used in writing, and also due to differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe, for example.

Whereas after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into small nation-states, whose identities were often defined by the language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period. It maintained a common written standard throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe.

As a result, Chinese make a sharp distinction between written language (“wen”) and spoken language (“yu”). The concept of a unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in the West.

The written Chinese language consists of about 40,000 characters, which can have as many as 30 strokes, while all varieties of spoken Chinese are tonal. This means that each syllable can have a number of different meanings depending on the intonation with which it is pronounced. For example Mandarin has 4 tones and Cantonese has between 6 and 9. 

With some experts predicting it will outpace US as the largest economy in the world, China’s continued strong economic growth is a major positive force in Asia. As a huge engine of growth and import demand, China offers more opportunities for other economies in the region following its accession to the World Trade Organisation. This has made the Chinese economy to play an increasingly bigger role in stabilising the world economy.