Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages, natively spoken by about seventy percent of all Chinese speakers across a wide area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Most Mandarin varieties have four lexical tones, and many, including that of Beijing, keep retroflex initial consonants that southern Chinese varieties have lost. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca for government officials and the courts since at least the fourteenth century, and in the early twentieth century a national standard based on the Beijing dialect was adopted. Standard Chinese is now official in China and Taiwan. In this atlas the entry names the modern spoken and written standard, in contrast with Classical Chinese, the literary language of the older canons.