Mandarin is the official language of China.It's the most widely spoken form of Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is spoken in all of China north of the Yangtze River and in much of the rest of the country and is the native language of two-thirds of the population.

Mandarin Chinese is often divided into four subgroups: Northern Mandarin, centring on Peking and spoken in northern China and Manchuria (Northeast Provinces); Northwestern Mandarin, extending northward from the city of Pao-chi and through most of northwestern China; Southwestern Mandarin, centring in the area around Chungking and spoken in Szechwan and adjoining parts of southwestern China; and Southern, or Lower Yangtze, Mandarin, in an area with Nanking as its centre.

Mandarin Chinese in the form spoken in and around Peking forms the basis for Modern Standard Chinese--Kuo-yü (Guoyu), "national language," or P'u-t'ung-hua (Putonghua), "common language." Modern Standard Chinese is also spoken officially on Taiwan.

Mandarin uses four tones--level, rising, falling, and high-rising--to distinguish words or syllables that have the same series of consonants and vowels but different meanings; both Mandarin and the standard language have few words ending with a consonant. Mandarin, like all other varieties of Chinese, has mostly monosyllabic words and word elements, and, because there are neither markers for inflection nor markers to indicate parts of speech, it has a fixed word order.