After arifsali clipped a list of top ten languages, a discussion began about how much of China actually speaks Mandarin. I found a couple of tips - it looks like a difficult problem!

Here's arifsali's original clip. Go pop it for bringing it up!

Thanks Masbury. I wonder if, in Arifsali's clip, Mandarin is listed because it is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan-Republic of China.

My interest here is, population-wise, how much of China speaks Mandarin vs. other dialects, given that it is no. 1 on the list, but no other dialects make the top 10. It seems as if they just lumped them all together.

It's a good question - I'm going to dig around a little and see if I can find out. Part of the problem that I didn't have room to clip is that it looks like the written language is the same across the nation. So some speak of "Chinese" and rightly suggest it as the language of almost the whole nation - for it is, when written (if I'm understanding correctly). But in spoken language, there are even many sub-dialects of the ones mentioned above. And it appears that the ones mentioned really cannot communicate with each other orally.

Got it! How Many Chinese Speak Mandarin?