Ranked: Countries With The Most Native Chinese Speakers
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Chinese is the worlds most spoken language, with more than 1.3 billion native speakers.
This graphic ranks the top countries by number of native Chinese speakers. Figures were sourced from WorldData.info, which were last updated in July 2024. It includes Mandarin, Cantonese, and other dialects.
What is “Chinese”?
Chinese refers to a group of related languages, or dialects, spoken primarily by the Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, native to Greater China.
Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the official language of mainland China, Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore. It is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the dominant spoken variety of Chinese.
| Country | Region | Total |
|---|---|---|
| 🇨🇳 China | East Asia | 1,297,853,000 |
| 🇹🇼 Taiwan | East Asia | 23,291,000 |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | Southeast Asia | 8,832,000 |
| 🇭🇰 Hong Kong | East Asia | 7,220,000 |
| 🇲🇾 Malaysia | Southeast Asia | 3,671,000 |
| 🇸🇬 Singapore | Southeast Asia | 3,077,000 |
| 🇺🇸 U.S. | North America | 3,014,000 |
| 🇵🇭 Philippines | Southeast Asia | 2,347,000 |
| 🇻🇳 Vietnam | Southeast Asia | 1,384,000 |
The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family.
The earliest attested written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE.
While there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, in daily use, a much smaller number is required. Around 3,000 to 3,500 characters cover 99% of the characters used in modern Chinese writing.
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