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 Beijing and spoken in northern China and the Northeast provinces (Manchuria); Northwestern Mandarin, extending northward from the city of Baoji and through most of northwestern China; Southwestern Mandarin, centring on the area around Chongqing and spoken in Sichuan and adjoining parts of southwestern China; and Southern, or Lower Yangtze, Mandarin, in an area centred on Nanjing.

Mandarin Chinese in the form spoken in and around Beijing forms the basis for Modern Standard Chinese—Guoyu, “National Language,” usually called putonghua “common language” by the Chinese. 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.