Mandarin, Putonghua and Chinese dialects: what language is spoken in China

October 13, 2026 · 9 min read

The national language of China is Putonghua, 普通话 pǔtōnghuà — “the common language”. Outside China it is called Mandarin, or Standard Chinese. It is the language of school lessons, news anchors and officials, the one foreigners learn and the one the HSK exam tests. But at home, at the market and with the neighbors, many people in China speak a local dialect — and Chinese dialects differ so much that someone from Beijing can’t understand someone from Hong Kong by ear. Below: what language people in China actually speak, how many Chinese dialects there are, how Mandarin compares with Cantonese, and which one to learn.

What is Putonghua?

Putonghua is the literary standard that was fixed as the country’s common language in the middle of the last century. Its definition has three parts: the pronunciation of Beijing, the vocabulary and base of the northern dialects, and the grammar of model modern prose. “Common” here means “commonly understood”: a language in which someone from the north and someone from the south can talk to each other.

Putonghua is not the same as the Beijing dialect. A born-and-bred Beijinger speaks with a heavy “r” at the end of words and local slang that the standard doesn’t have. Putonghua is how a news anchor speaks: Beijing sounds, cleaned of everything local.

Chinese itself has several words for the language, and a beginner should know them all:

• 普通话pǔtōnghuàPutonghua, Mandarinthe spoken standard of the PRC
• 汉语Hànyǔthe Chinese languageliterally “language of the Han”
• 中文ZhōngwénChinese (language and writing)the most everyday word
• 方言fāngyándialectliterally “local speech”

Putonghua vs Mandarin: what’s the difference?

In everyday use there is none: Mandarin Chinese and Putonghua are two names for the same language. The word “Mandarin” came through Portuguese: that is what Europeans called Chinese officials, and their speech was “the language of the mandarins”. It translates the Chinese 官话 guānhuà, “officials’ speech”: for centuries that was the name of the common northern language in which civil servants from different provinces talked to each other. So Mandarin is the same language, just with a European name.

For linguists the word is broader. Mandarin, or Northern Chinese, is a whole group of dialects, from Harbin to Kunming. Putonghua is the standard that grew out of this group. Someone from Sichuan speaks a “Mandarin” dialect but not Putonghua: the tones and some of the words are their own, though a Beijinger will mostly understand them.

There are two more names for the same standard — you’ll hear them outside mainland China:

• 国语 Guóyǔ — “the national language”. That is what Standard Chinese is called in Taiwan. It differs from Putonghua the way British English differs from American: accent, some words, the reading of a few characters.
• 华语 Huáyǔ — “the language of the Chinese”. The name used in Singapore and Malaysia, where Chinese is the language of a community rather than of the whole country.

All three are one language with small local features. Learn Putonghua and you will understand a Taiwanese news anchor and a Singaporean one too. The difference is bigger in writing: mainland China uses simplified characters, Taiwan traditional ones. How simplified and traditional Chinese differ is explained in Traditional vs simplified characters.

How many Chinese dialects are there?

There is no exact number: it depends on what you count. Linguists group them into seven to ten major groups. The classic count is seven. More detailed ones split Jin (Shanxi province) off from the northern group and Hui (southern Anhui) off from Wu, and count Pinghua in Guangxi separately. Within each group there are dozens of varieties and hundreds of local dialects, and neighboring counties often struggle to understand each other.

The shares are estimates, and sources differ by a few percent: censuses don’t record dialects, and many people speak both their local one and Putonghua. The main picture is clear anyway: most people speak northern dialects, and all the variety is concentrated in the southeast. There, mountains and rivers kept neighbors apart for centuries, and their speech had time to drift apart.

The groups themselves are not uniform either. Min is really several languages: people from Fuzhou and from Xiamen can’t understand each other. Taiwanese belongs to this group too — a Southern Min variety that people in Taiwan speak at home alongside Guoyu.

Can Chinese people understand each other?

Spoken — no, not if each speaks their own dialect. Shanghainese, Cantonese and the Beijing dialect are as far apart to the ear as Spanish, French and Romanian. That is why many linguists consider them separate languages of one family. In China they are called dialects: they share a history, a writing system and one literary standard. It is an argument about words, and it has no clear-cut answer.

Two things help. The first is Putonghua: it is taught in schools across the country, and today most people can get by in it, and almost all young city dwellers. The second is writing. A character records a word, not a sound, so a newspaper written in standard Chinese can be read by someone from Shanghai and someone from Guangzhou alike — each will read it aloud in their own way.

Take the greeting. It is written the same everywhere but sounds different. In Putonghua it is 你好 nǐhǎo — hello; in Cantonese the same two characters sound roughly like “nay ho”.

Mandarin vs Cantonese: Hong Kong, Guangdong and six tones

Cantonese is the best-known Chinese dialect outside China. It belongs to the Yue group and is the language of Guangzhou (the old European name of the city is Canton), Hong Kong and Macau. Its speakers call it 广东话, “Guangdong speech”. Hong Kong action films and Cantopop are in Cantonese, and in the old Chinatowns of San Francisco, New York or London it was long heard more than Mandarin: most emigrants came from the south.

How Cantonese differs from Putonghua:

• Tones. Putonghua has four plus the neutral tone. Cantonese is said to have six or nine, depending on how you count. There are six distinct melodies. Three more appear if you count separately the short syllables that end abruptly in -p, -t, -k: their melodies are the same, but tradition treats them as tones of their own. On the tones of Putonghua, see Chinese tones.
• Syllable endings. In Putonghua a syllable ends in a vowel, -n or -ng. Cantonese has kept the old endings -m, -p, -t, -k, which makes it sound more clipped.
• Words and grammar. The most common words are different: “he”, “not”, “thank you” are not the ones used in Putonghua. They have their own characters that Standard Chinese doesn’t have.
• Writing. Hong Kong and Macau use traditional characters. Official texts are in standard written Chinese, while messages and social media are written the way people speak.

Pinyin doesn’t work for Cantonese: it was designed for the sounds of Putonghua. Cantonese has its own romanization systems, and in the most widely used one the greeting is nei5 hou2, with the tone written as a number.

Which Chinese should you learn?

Putonghua — with hardly any caveats. There are four reasons:

• It is understood everywhere. In Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taiwan and Singapore. Cantonese will get you understood in Hong Kong and Guangdong, Shanghainese only in Shanghai.
• All the learning material is in it. Textbooks, dictionaries, apps, courses and the HSK exam are built for Putonghua and simplified characters.
• It is easier on the ear. Four tones instead of six, about four hundred syllables and a ready-made Latin spelling — pinyin.
• It makes the next step easier. The characters and most of the vocabulary are shared between dialects. If you know Putonghua, you learn Cantonese as a related language, not from scratch.

It makes sense to learn a dialect first in one case: you are moving to Hong Kong or your family speaks Cantonese. Even then you will need Putonghua — it is taught in Hong Kong schools too.

If you are still choosing between languages, take a look at the comparison Chinese or Japanese. If you have chosen, go to How to start learning Chinese for the order of the first steps.

Which Chinese our course teaches

Nomto’s Chinese course is Putonghua and simplified characters, following the HSK syllabus from level 1 to level 6. The pronunciation is standard, with pinyin and tones; the words have recordings, and in the Pronunciation section your voice is compared with a model. Mei, your tutor, explains everything in English, and the course is free during the beta with an account. There are no dialects in the course, but everything you learn will help with them too: the characters are the same.

Here are a few words on the topic from the course vocabulary — worth recognizing by ear:

• 语言yǔyánlanguage
• 外语wàiyǔforeign language
• 标准biāozhǔnstandard
• 说话shuōhuàto speak, to talk