Ranked: Countries With The Most Native Chinese Speakers
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Chinese is the worlds most spoken language, with more than 1.3 billion native speakers.
This graphic ranks the top countries by number of native Chinese speakers. Figures were sourced from WorldData.info, which were last updated in July 2024. It includes Mandarin, Cantonese, and other dialects.
What is “Chinese”?
Chinese refers to a group of related languages, or dialects, spoken primarily by the Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, native to Greater China.
Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the official language of mainland China, Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore. It is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the dominant spoken variety of Chinese.
CountryRegionTotal
ChinaEast Asia1,297,853,000
TaiwanEast Asia23,291,000
ThailandSoutheast Asia8,832,000
Hong KongEast Asia7,220,000
MalaysiaSoutheast Asia3,671,000
SingaporeSoutheast Asia3,077,000
U.S.North America3,014,000
PhilippinesSoutheast Asia2,347,000
VietnamSoutheast Asia1,384,000
The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family.
The earliest attested written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE.
While there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, in daily use, a much smaller number is required. Around 3,000 to 3,500 characters cover 99% of the characters used in modern Chinese writing.
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To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic that shows the top 15 countries by native Spanish speakers.
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