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Mandarin Chinese

A job seeker looks at recruitment advertisements at a labor market in Guangdong province, where most people speak Cantonese.

Beijing has a message for China’s Cantonese speakers — stick to Mandarin!

Culture

The Cantonese-speaking heartland of southern China is also the country’s most populous region. But Beijing still considers the region’s native language of Cantonese to be a minority dialect, and now it wants Cantonese broadcasters to switch to Mandarin — but why now?

The children of migrant workers are taught Mandarin at a school in Shanghai. Many speak a regional dialect at home, and some don't speak Mandarin at all when they arrive for the first day of class.

China’s linguistic landscape is changing as rapidly as its cities and lifestyles

Development & Education
Gu Hangyu, sits with his grandmother Wang Yufang, at her home on Chongming Island near Shanghai. She speaks the Chongming dialect, but not standard Chinese.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese stubbornly resist speaking the ‘common tongue’

Development & Education

Digital culture morphing Chinese language, one pun at a time

Chinese Wedding Rush on “Love You Forever” Day

Lifestyle & Belief

Podcast: The Chinese Yuan and the Currency of Language

The World in Words

Does China’s rise mean that Mandarin will one day replace English as the language of global trade?

The World

Cantonese: a Dialect in Peril?

Arts, Culture & Media

In official China, Mandarin is favored over all other dialects. That has had a knock-on effect here in the US, where Cantonese used to be the dominant Chinese language. Reporter Nina Porzucki reports from New York on how Cantonese is faring.