Mandarin Chinese in the context of Traditional Chinese characters

Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It originated in the Kingdom of Castile, a historical kingdom in north-central Spain. Today, it is a global language with 519 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 636 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.

Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group, in which the language is also known as Castilian (castellano). The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.

English is a West Germanic language that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

English is either the official language, or one of the official languages, in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world. In the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is the dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet. Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.4 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021.

Chinese (spoken: simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, written: 中文; Zhōngwén) is an umbrella term for Sinitic languages in the Sino-Tibetan language family, widely recognized as a group of language varieties, spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak one of the Chinese languages as their first language.

The Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Chinese government considers the spoken varieties of the Chinese languages dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are considered to be separate languages in a family by linguists. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g., Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g., Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g., Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g., Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic.

This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.

All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian, and English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu, and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.

There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.

Chinese varieties have the greatest differences in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones, with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi, with the most complex patterns in the coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong.

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).

Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). It is designated as the national lingua franca of China, one of the official languages of the United Nations and of Singapore, and one of the national languages of Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.

Like other Sinitic languages, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object (SVO) word order. Compared with southern varieties, the language has fewer vowels, final consonants and tones, but more initial consonants. It is an analytic language, albeit with many compound words.

Sinophone, which means "Chinese-speaking", typically refers to an individual who speaks at least one variety of Chinese (that is, one of the Sinitic languages). Academic writers often use the term Sinophone in two definitions: either specifically "Chinese-speaking populations where it is a minority language, excluding mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan" or generally "Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language". Many authors use the collocation Sinophone world or Chinese-speaking world to mean the Chinese-speaking world itself (consisting of Greater China and Singapore) or the distribution of the Chinese diaspora outside of Greater China.

Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese languages today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it the most spoken first language in the world and second most spoken overall. It is the official variety of Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Meanwhile, Cantonese is the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau and is also widely spoken among significant overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as well as the rest of the world.

Uyghur, formerly known as Turki or Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language of the Karluk branch, with 8 to 13 million native speakers (as of 2021). It is spoken primarily by the Uyghur people, most of whom live in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Apart from Xinjiang, significant communities of Uyghur speakers are also located in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries. Uyghur is a lingua franca of Xinjiang; it is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio. Other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also use Uyghur as a common language.

Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. More distinctly, Uyghur processes include vowel reduction and umlauting, especially in northern dialects. In addition to other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been strongly influenced by Arabic and Persian, and more recently by Russian and Mandarin Chinese.

Written vernacular Chinese, also known as baihua, comprises forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular varieties of the language spoken throughout China. It is contrasted with Literary Chinese, which was the predominant written form of the language in imperial China until the early 20th century.

A style based on vernacular Mandarin Chinese was used in novels by Ming and Qing dynasty authors, and was later refined by intellectuals associated with the May Fourth Movement. This form corresponds to spoken Standard Chinese, but is the standard form of writing used by speakers of all varieties of Chinese throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. It is commonly called Standard Written Chinese or Modern Written Chinese to distinguish it from spoken vernaculars and other written vernaculars, like written Cantonese and written Hokkien.

Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century, and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. Cantonese is a common language in places like Hong Kong and Macau. While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not have characters for them and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.

With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese-speaking areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters.

The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the city of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shanghainese, like the rest of the Wu language group, is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese, such as Mandarin.

Shanghainese belongs to a separate group of the Taihu Wu subgroup. With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Since the late 19th century, it has served as the lingua franca of the entire Yangtze River Delta region, but in recent decades its status has declined relative to Mandarin, which most Shanghainese speakers can also speak.

Chinese poetry is poetry written, spoken, or chanted in the Chinese language, and a part of the Chinese literature. While this last term comprises Classical Chinese, Standard Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, and other historical and vernacular forms of the language, its poetry generally falls into one of two primary types, Classical Chinese poetry and Modern Chinese poetry.

Poetry is consistently held in high regard in China, often incorporating expressive folk influences filtered through the minds of Chinese literati. Poetry provides a format and a forum for both public and private expressions of deep emotion, offering an audience of peers, readers, and scholars insight into the inner life of Chinese writers across more than two millennia. Chinese poetry often reflects the influence of China's various religious traditions.

Manchu (ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ
ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ Manju gisun) is a critically endangered Tungusic language native to the historical region of Manchuria in Northeast China. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was the national language of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) of China, although today the vast majority of Manchus speak only Mandarin Chinese. Several thousand can speak Manchu as a second language through governmental primary education or free classes for adults in classrooms or online. There are no more native speakers of Manchu as of 2024.

The Manchu language has high historical value for historians of China, especially for the Qing dynasty. Manchu-language texts supply information that is unavailable in Chinese, and when both Manchu and Chinese versions of a given text exist, they provide controls for understanding the Chinese.

In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology (as in languages such as Latin) or relational nouns (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is described as agent–object–verb (AOV) instead of subject–object–verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.

North China (Chinese: 华北) is a geographical region of the People's Republic of China, consisting of five provincial-level administrative divisions, namely the direct-administered municipalities Beijing and Tianjin, the provinces Hebei and Shanxi, and the autonomous region Inner Mongolia (although the four prefectures east of the Greater Khingan Range are sometimes regarded as parts of Northeast China).

Part of the larger region of Northern China (Beifang), it lies north of the Qinling–Huaihe Line, with its heartland in the North China Plain. Most inhabitants here speak variants of Northern Chinese languages such as Mandarin, which includes the Beijing dialect and its cousin variants. The Beijing dialect is largely the basis of Standard Chinese (or Standard Mandarin), the official language of the People's Republic of China. Jin Chinese and Mongolian are also widely spoken due to the political and cultural history of the area.

The Nianfo (Chinese: 念佛; pinyin: niànfó, alternatively in Japanese 念仏 (ねんぶつ, nenbutsu); Korean: 염불; RR: yeombul; or Vietnamese: niệm Phật) is a Buddhist practice central to East Asian Buddhism. The Chinese term nianfo is a translation of Sanskrit buddhānusmṛti ("recollection of the Buddha"), a classic Buddhist mindfulness (smṛti) practice.

Nianfo focused on the Buddha Amitābha is also the most important practice in Pure Land Buddhism. In the context of East Asian Pure Land practice, nianfo typically refers to the oral repetition of the name of Amitābha through the phrase "Homage to Amitabha Buddha" (Ch: 南無阿彌陀佛, Mandarin: Nāmó Āmítuófó, Jp: Namu Amida Butsu, Vn: Nam-mô A-di-đà Phật; from the Sanskrit: Namo'mitābhāya Buddhāya). It can also refer to that phrase itself, in which case it may also be called the nianfo, or "The Name" (Japanese: myōgō 名号).