Standard Chinese

GuoyuTraditional ChineseSimplified ChineseLiteral meaningNational languageHuayuTraditional ChineseSimplified ChineseLiteral meaningChinese languageThis article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper , you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see .

Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ), often colloquially called Mandarin Chinese, is the modern standardized form of Mandarin Chinese, largely based on the Beijing dialect. It is the officiallingua franca of the People's Republic of China, one of the six official languages of the United Nations, one of the national languagesof Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is a pluricentric language with local variations in Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore, which mainly differ in accent and lexicon. In Mainland China, Standard Chinese is most commonly called Putonghua, while in Taiwan it is most commonly called Guoyu.

Like other Sinitic languages, Standard Chinese is an analytic language with mostly compound words, and has five phonemic tones (four classic tones and a neutral tone) with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object (SVO) word order. Compared with other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese has fewer tones, vowels and final consonants, but more initial consonants.