Where Mandarin Chinese is spoken
Mandarin Chinese is spoken in 23 countries: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and 19 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| China | 90% | 1,274,436,000 |
| Taiwan | 95% | 22,415,535 |
| Hong Kong | 100% | 7,297,820 |
| Malaysia | 17% | 5,876,016 |
| Singapore | 77% | 4,641,914 |
| Indonesia | 0.9% | 2,590,370 |
| United States | 0.7% | 2,359,545 |
| Thailand | 1.8% | 1,258,578 |
| Vietnam | 1.1% | 1,163,349 |
| Canada | 2.7% | 1,047,460 |
| Philippines | 0.7% | 863,422 |
| Macau | 100% | 644,426 |
| Australia | 2.1% | 562,141 |
| United Kingdom | 0.3% | 205,377 |
| Brunei | 11% | 54,109 |
| Mongolia | 1.4% | 45,944 |
| French Polynesia | 7.8% | 23,676 |
| Suriname | 1.1% | 7,114 |
| Panama | 0.1% | 5,811 |
| Laos | Not given | Not given |
| Myanmar | Not given | Not given |
| North Korea | Not given | Not given |
| Russia | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Mandarin Chinese is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Mandarin Chinese.
How many people speak Mandarin Chinese?
Wikidata gives about 918 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Mandarin Chinese sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Mandarin Chinese as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic
- Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Northern Chinese
- Mandarinic
- Mandarin Chinese
Related languages
Other languages in the Mandarinic group:
More about Mandarin Chinese
- Read about Mandarin Chinese on Wikipedia
- Sino-Tibetan languages map
- Languages spoken in China
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 cmn, Glottolog mand1415. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Mandarin Chinese
Where is Mandarin Chinese spoken?
Mandarin Chinese is spoken in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and 19 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 90% of the population of China, which is about 1,274,436,000 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Mandarin Chinese?
Wikidata gives about 918 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Mandarin Chinese in?
Glottolog places Mandarin Chinese in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Sinitic, Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic, Middle-Modern Sinitic, Northern Chinese and Mandarinic.