Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese languages/dialects.
It is spoken in a huge area of the mainland running diagonally from the extreme southwest to Manchuria and also along the entire east coast north of Shanghai.

Mandarin, belongs to an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This includes several major subfamilies:

Tibetan, spoken in Tibet
Lolo-Burmese, in Burma

The major linguistic distinctions within Chinese are Mandarin, Wu, Min, Yue (Cantonese), and Hakka (Kejia).

Mandarin is written in traditional Chinese characters, a system that developed over 4,000 years ago. It utilizes a set of logographs of several types: pictographs, ideographs, compound ideographs, loan characters, and phonetic compounds.

Mandarin,is the official language of the People's Republic of China.
It is also the official language of Taiwan, where it is called Guoyu, and is one of the official languages of Singapore where it is referred to as Huayu.

All of the official standards are based on the Beijing dialect. The term Mandarin itself derives from a Beijing expression, which means "officials' language."

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