Chinese or Mandarin belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and is with more than 850 million native speakers the largest language in the world. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect. It is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages in Singapore. The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is a complex one. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less.

Written Chinese employs Chinese characters. The widespread idea that all Chinese characters are pictographs or ideographs is wrong, since most characters contain phonetic parts. More than 40.000 different characters are known, but a well-educated Chinese would normally recognise around 7000 characters. In the Southern part of China they speak a dialect called Cantonese, which is so different from Mandarin as to be an independent language, although the written forms are the same. English is not widely understood, especially not in rural areas or by the older generation.