Mandarin (Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. "Northern speech" OR 北方方言 Hanyu Pinyin: Běifāng Fāngyán, lit. "Northern dialects"), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The term "Mandarin" can also refer to Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the official spoken languages of Singapore. When taken as an independent language, as is often done in academic literature, Mandarin has more speakers than any other language.

"Mandarin" usually refers to only standard Mandarin in everyday usage. The broad academic concept of "Mandarin" encompasses a large number of linguistically related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others, and is very rarely used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin". Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language, though there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects.