How many different sorts of spoken and written Chinese are there?
There are many Chinese dialects, some people speaking only one and some speaking several. These have now diverged to become mutually unintelligible in some cases, owing to historical factors. But Mandarin, the dialect used for all official purposes, is spoken by approximately 70% of all Chinese people and understood and spoken by basically all educated speakers of other dialects in China and Taiwan, such as Taiwanese people speaking Hoklo or Cantonese people speaking Cantonese. Chinese characters were simplified in 1956 and in 1964 to ease the learning of the language, resulting in two main Chinese writing systems, Traditional or Fanti Zi and Simplified or Jianti Zi. Taiwan still uses Traditional characters, while the People’s Republic uses Simplified characters.
