The Chinese Language

The Chinese economy is now the second largest economy in the world and has been consistently clocking a very strong growth rate.

China has emerged as the largest global manufacturing hub across industries, and knowledge of Mandarin Chinese has proven to be essential in the conduct of business dealings with Chinese corporations and manufacturers.

For a very long time, China had remained insulated from the rest of the world. As a consequence, the familiarity with and use of foreign languages (including English) in China has been very limited.

While this is changing, with learning of English being actively encouraged in China, knowledge of English is not widespread, and it therefore becomes mandatory for entrepreneurs and others who have business dealings with China to develop at least a working knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken Chinese language.

Chinese or the Sinitic languages is a language family consisting of between seven and thirteen language groups (depending on classification scheme), of which the most-widely spoken is Mandarin Chinese.

There are 850 million Mandarin Chinese speakers worldwide, with ‘Wu’ at 90 million being a distant second.

Standard Mandarin (based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing) is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore.

It is spoken widely in the North and the Southwest of China, as well as in Singapore and other parts of South East Asia.