How Many Countries Speak Chinese in the World?

Chinese is spoken as the official language. List ofChinese-speaking nations also includes republics with multiple official languages. Countries, nations and states with an official language of Chinese are sortable by column and Chinese-speaking nations are in alphabetical order.

• China
• Hong Kong
• Macau
• Singapore

FACTS ABOUT THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

•  If you know 1000 commonly used characters, you will recognize 90% of the characters in Chinese newspapers.
• Chinese grammar is very straightforward: no plurals, no tenses, no subject-verb agreement, and no conjugations.
• Mandarin Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet. It is written with symbols.
• Chinese characters can be written from left to right, right to left, or from top to bottom.

There are more people speaking Chinese than English.  It’s the number one spoken language in the world.

China has the largest population in the world with approximately 1.28 billion people, so learning to speak Chinese means you will be able to communicate with a gazillion people in the world!

Apart from China, there are various speakers of Mandarin Chinese spread across the globe. Read on to find out where exactly is Mandarin Chinese spoken in the world.

CHINA

There are as many as 292 living languages in China. The languages most commonly spoken belong to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which contains Mandarin (spoken natively by 70% of the population), and other Chinese varieties.

HONG KONG

Both both Chinese and English are common throughout the territory. Since the 1997 Handover, an increase in immigrants from mainland China and greater interaction with the mainland’s economy have brought an increasing number of Mandarin speakers to Hong Kong. According to the 2011 census, Mandarin is spoken by 47.8% of the population, with 1.4 percent as a first language and 46.5 percent as a second language.

MACAU

Macau’s official languages are Chinese (Cantonese) and Portuguese. Macau still retains its own dialect of Portuguese, called Macanese Portuguese. Other languages, such as Mandarin, English, and Hokkien, are spoken by local communities.

SINGAPORE

Singapore has four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil. Singaporean Mandarin is predominantly spoken as the native language by the greatest number of Singaporeans, with 1.2 million speaking it as their mother tongue.