Sinophone

For the extinct mammal genus, see Sinophoneus.
Not to be confused with Sinophobe, Sinophile, or Sinosphere.
Map of the Chinese-speaking world.
  Countries and regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority
  Countries and regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language
  Countries with significant Chinese-speaking minorities

Sinophone, which means "Chinese-speaking", typically refers to an individual who speaks at least one variety of Chinese (that is, one of the Sinitic languages). Academic writers often use the term Sinophone in two definitions: either specifically "Chinese-speaking populations where it is a minority language, excluding Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan" or generally "Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language".[1] Many authors use the collocation Sinophone world or Chinese-speaking world to mean the Chinese-speaking world itself (consisting of Greater China and Singapore) or the distribution of the Chinese diaspora outside of Greater China.

Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese language today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it the most spoken first language in the world and second most spoken overall.[2] It is the official variety of Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Meanwhile, Cantonese is the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau and is also widely spoken among significant Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as well as the rest of the world.

  1. ^ McDonald, Edward. The '中国通' or the 'Sinophone'? Towards a political economy of Chinese language teaching, School of Asian Studies, University of Auckland, 2010.
  2. ^ "Summary by language size". Ethnologue. 3 October 2018.