Startling Facts About Mandarin

Being the best online Chinese translators, we understand the history, value, importance and significance of this language. This language might bring to your mind the largest in population and a rapidly progressing nation. Or it might make you think of action movies and martial arts. But we still bet that there are some things about this ancient language that you still don’t know.

Facts About Mandarin Users

Madarin has more native speakers than any other language in the world. Almost one billion people around the world call Mandarin their mother tongue.

1.     Official Language

Madarin is generally thought of as only China’s official language. When in fact, Taiwan’s national language is Mandarin as well. Singapore, being a close third, includes Mandarin as one of its four official languages. Mandarin is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, with other languages being English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and French.

2.     Written Mandarin

Unlike most languages, Mandarin doesn’t exactly have letters. Written Mandarin is communicated through specific symbols. These symbols are referred to as Mandarin Chinese characters. These characters also just happen to be the oldest example of a written communication language. Mandarin characters are almost 100,000 in number. Only the most complicated and advanced dictionaries list all known characters. Like everything else in the world, languages evolve as well. So, these character dictionaries are not always up to date with new words. 

3.     Roman Languages

Most complicated and old languages use English characters to write their words on cell phones or on computers. Roman Mandarin has its own unique name, Pinyin. Pinyin is often used by educational institutes to teach Mandarin to non-natives. It is especially popular within the young Chinese population. 

4.     Official Name

You will be amazed to know that Mandarin is not actually called Mandarin by the native speakers. The official name of Mandarin is Putonghua in China. The word can be roughly translated as ‘common language’. The other country to call Mandarin its official language, Taiwan, has its own official name for it. In Taiwan, it is called Guoyu, which amazingly enough, translates into national language.

We hope that after reading this, your interest in the language will only grow and you will want to learn it yourself. But if you ever need  the best Chinese translators, then you can contact us any time. We also specialize in web and mobile services as well as software localization.