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The Chinese languages are the languages of the Han people, the major ethnic group of China. The Chinese languages are spoken by over one billion people. Approximately 95 percent of the Chinese population speaks Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai spoken by minorities.

Chinese belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese has features that distinguish itself from most Western languages: it is monosyllabic, has little inflection, and is tonal. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tone languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch-high or low-or a distinctive pitch contour-level, rising, or falling.

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants, generally referred to as dialects. Most Chinese speak one of the Mandarin dialects, which are largely mutually intelligible.

The need to establish an official national language was felt as early as the 17th century when the Qing dynasty established a number of "correct pronunciation institutes" to teach standard Peking pronunciation, particularly in the Cantonese and Fukienese-speaking southern provinces. The concept of a national language coalesced around 1910. In 1913, the Ministry of Education convened a Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation to establish a standard national tongue.

After several previous attempts to write Chinese using the letters of the roman alphabet, pinyin, a 58-symbol writing system was finally adopted in 1958. Its main aims are to facilitate the spread of putonghua, and the learning of Chinese characters.

In mainland China a simplified writing system is used, whereas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas regions the traditional script is being used. The simplified writing system differs in two ways from the traditional writing system: (1) a reduction of the number of strokes per character and (2) the reduction of the number of characters in common use (two different characters are now written with the same character).