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Chinese-Mandarin

Chinese-Mandarin Chinese is the most appropriate term to use to reference the large number of Chinese language dialects spoken across broad portions of northern and south-western China. More often it is used to describe the official language of both the People’s Republic of China (China) and Taiwan, which is based on the standard Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Mandarin is the main language of government, the media and education in China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages in Singapore.1

Mandarin was originally the language spoken by Chinese officials and was called “Official Language” in Chinese. The word Mandarin comes, via Portuguese, from the Sanskrit word mandari (commander), and is related to the English word “mandate”. The Portuguese used the term to refer to both the people and their language.2

If taken as a separate and distinct language, Chinese-Mandarin would have to be considered the most widely spoken language in the world with an estimated 885 million speakers Chinese characters, which are more properly considered symbols known as “zi”, do not indicate pronunciation. Instead, they depict specific objects as well as abstract concepts and ideas. The Kangxi Dictionary, published in the 18th century under the Manchu Qing Dynasty, contains an estimated 49,000 different characters, of which an average educated Chinese person should know around 4,000, and is still used today as a method for categorizing traditional Chinese characters.

In the United States, Chinese-Mandarin is the 28th most frequently-spoken language (out of the 322 languages documented in the 2000 Census), with one of every 1,503 people age five and above using Chinese-Mandarin in the home. Native speakers are heavily concentrated in California, New York, and New Jersey; in Santa Clara County, California, one in every 90 residents is a Chinese-Mandarin speaker (approximately 19,237 persons of an estimated county population of 1,731,281 persons).3

Chinese-Mandarin is classified by the Defense Language Institute as a “category four” (out of four) language in regards to difficulty of mastery by native English speakers4 On the Foreign Service Institute language difficulty scale, Chinese-Mandarin is rated as a “category three” language (out of three), due to the exceptional difficulty it poses for English speakers to learn.5

Chinese-Mandarin is one of the ten NLSC Pilot Program languages

Chinese-Mandarin is designated as one of the ten pilot languages that the NLSC is recruiting during its pilot year. The languages chosen were selected based upon the following:

  • They meet short- and long-term requirements with emphasis on high-level expertise in languages critical to our national security
  • These languages generally meet the requirements for a pilot such as this based on the number of persons residing in the United States who are proficient in these languages.
  • The list of languages includes some whose populations are difficult to locate and recruit.
  • Each of these languages has multiple proficiency tests available.

Interesting Resources on Chinese-Mandarin

  1. Richard Sears, Chinese.Etymology.org
  2. Omniglot Chinese-Mandarin Language Page
  3. U.S. English Foundation Mandarin Data Sheet

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