Only half of Chinese can speak Mandarin?

China’s state news agency reports that only around 53 percent of Chinese can “effectively communicate orally in [M]andarin.” That number goes down to 45 percent in rural areas, and only 31 percent of Chinese between the ages of 60 and 69 can speak China’s main dialect well, as opposed to 70 percent of those between ...

603484_070307_mandarin_05.jpg
603484_070307_mandarin_05.jpg

China's state news agency reports that only around 53 percent of Chinese can "effectively communicate orally in [M]andarin." That number goes down to 45 percent in rural areas, and only 31 percent of Chinese between the ages of 60 and 69 can speak China's main dialect well, as opposed to 70 percent of those between the ages of 15 and 29. Mandarin is the lingua franca of urbanites and the young, reflecting a government drive to standardize communication and strengthen national unity.

China’s state news agency reports that only around 53 percent of Chinese can “effectively communicate orally in [M]andarin.” That number goes down to 45 percent in rural areas, and only 31 percent of Chinese between the ages of 60 and 69 can speak China’s main dialect well, as opposed to 70 percent of those between the ages of 15 and 29. Mandarin is the lingua franca of urbanites and the young, reflecting a government drive to standardize communication and strengthen national unity.

So what do Chinese speak when they aren’t speaking what they call Putonghua (literally “common talk”)? Hundreds of other dialects, such as Cantonese. The characters are the same throughout the country, but the pronunciation can be vastly different, making it hard for people from separate regions to understand one another. And with China’s astonishingly rapid urbanization of recent years, migrants from outlying areas can have trouble communicating in their new hometowns.

(The sample size used by the Ministry of Education, which conducted the survey, is a little unusual: 500,000 people. I guess that’s how it goes in a country of 1.3 billion.)

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