Chinese (Pinyin: Hànyu; Huáyu; or Zhongwén) is a language (or language family) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.

About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language. In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable in many respects to the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a single language rather than a group of languages, it has the largest number of speakers in the world; if not, Mandarin still holds that title, with Wu and Cantonese following at tenth and sixteenth places respectively.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, a member of the Mandarin group; it is described in the article "Standard Mandarin." Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China or Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).

Vernacular Chinese, which is most closely based on the Mandarin group, is the standardized written language used by speakers of all Chinese spoken variants. Some other variants, including Cantonese and Minnan, have also developed written forms that correspond more closely to the spoken form of those variants, though these are used predominantly in informal contexts.