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Around 20% of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language, with standard Mandarin being the most common. Most linguists classify all variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe they are all derived from an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Mandarin or Guanhua (北方話 or 官話) is the family of related languages spoken natively across most of northern and southwestern Mainland China by close to one billion people. The Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing (Peking) functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (Standard Chinese or Putonghua), the official language of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non-Standard Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese.

The relationship between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Unfortunately, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow for reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan are poorly documented and not well understood.

Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China late in the 2nd millenium BC and that no evidence exists to suggest the transmission of writing from elsewhere. The earliest recognisable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC.

Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of people speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qīng Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up academies to make pronunciation conform to the Qīng capital Běijīng's standard, but with little success. During the Qīng's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Běijīng Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various regional dialects for daily life, and the new Mandarin standard was thus fairly limited.

This situation changed with the creation of an education system which uses Standard Mandarin as the language of instruction. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Taiwan. At the time of the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin in mainland China and Taiwan, Hong Kong was a British colony and Standard Mandarin was never used. In Hong Kong, the language of education, formal speech, and daily life remains the local Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.