Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is the largest Sinitic language by number of speakers and the basis of Standard Chinese, the official language of mainland China and Taiwan. It is a tonal, largely isolating language written with Chinese characters, a logographic script it shares with the other Sinitic languages despite their being mutually unintelligible in speech, a case where the writing system unifies what the spoken language does not. Its status as a single language rather than a family of related languages, alongside Cantonese, Wu, Min and the rest, is itself a matter of political convention as much as linguistic classification; by ordinary mutual-intelligibility tests several of the so-called Chinese dialects would count as separate languages.