The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文;Pinyin: Hànyǔ, Huáyǔ, or Zhōngwén) is a tonal language and a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often regarded for cultural reasons as a single language, its regional variation is comparable to those of Romance languages. However, all of the users of spoken varieties of Chinese have always used a common formal written language, which since the beginning of the twentieth century has been Vernacular Chinese (based on Mandarin), written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters.

About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China in mainland China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the two official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macao (together with Portuguese).

The terms and concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those used in the West, partly because of the unifying effects of the Chinese characters used in writing, and partly because of differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe. Whereas after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into small nation-states, the identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe. As a result, Chinese make a sharp distinction between Written language (wen/文) and Spoken language (yu/語). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in the West. One uniform written language continues to be used (with a few exceptions) instead of written versions of the spoken languages.