Where is Chinese spoken? Mandarin, the dialect groups and a map

“Chinese” is not one spoken language but a family: Mandarin across the north, centre and west of China, and Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka and Cantonese in the south-east. The map below shows them. This guide explains what each is, which one learners study, and where Chinese is official.

Updated November 7, 2026 · 3 min read

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A family of languages, one writing system

The Chinese languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. Their spoken varieties are popularly called dialects but are usually classified by scholars as separate languages: speakers of different varieties cannot understand each other, and the varieties differ about as much as the Romance languages, mostly in pronunciation and vocabulary rather than grammar (Britannica). What unites them is writing — the characters, which a reader of any variety can read in his or her own pronunciation. Why learn it at all: Why learn Chinese?

Reading the map

On the map at the top of the page, the large brown area is Mandarin, spoken in the northern, central and western parts of China. In the south-east the colours change: Wu (around Shanghai), Gan, Xiang, Min (including Taiwan’s Southern Min), Hakka and Yue, better known as Cantonese (around Guangzhou and Hong Kong). The groups follow Britannica’s list (Britannica); the map’s own speaker counts are its author’s estimates.

Northern and southern Chinese

Britannica divides the Sinitic languages into a Northern group — the Mandarin dialects, which are more similar to each other — and a Southern group: Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue and Min. Southern varieties keep more one-syllable words; Cantonese uses at least six tones, where Modern Standard Chinese has four (Britannica). The history of how they drifted apart is in A short history of Chinese.

The standard you will learn

Modern Standard Chinese grew out of an early-1900s programme to unify the national language on the basis of Mandarin, and pinyin — based on Beijing pronunciation — was adopted to help spread it (Britannica). In mainland China, the State Council’s 2013 Table of General Standard Chinese Characters sets the standard written forms (State Council). It is the Chinese written in pinyin, and the one our Chinese level test checks.

Where Chinese is official

One script across East Asia

Chinese writing was fundamental to the writing systems of East Asia; Britannica estimates that some 1.34 billion people use the characters, called hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean (Britannica). That is why learners of Japanese recognise many Chinese characters — and why our Japanese level test is a natural next step for some.

Chinese learners worldwide

The HSK, China’s international proficiency test, reports about 800,000 test takers a year at more than 1,500 test centres in 169 countries (chinesetest.cn). On the websites W3Techs can classify, Chinese is the content language of 1.2% (W3Techs).

Keep learning

• Why learn Chinese? 7 reasons
• A short history of Chinese — oracle bones to pinyin
• Chinese grammar basics · Chinese tenses: time and aspect
• Level tests in 36 languages · All guides · Plans