Spoken Chinese

Chinese is a family of closely related but mutually unintelligible languages. These languages are known variously as fangyan (regional languages), dialects of Chinese or varieties of Chinese. In all over 1.3 billion people speak one or more varieties of Chinese.
All varieties of Chinese belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of language sand each one has its own dialects and sub-dialects, which are more or less mutually unintelligible.
All varieties of Chinese are tonal. This means that each syllable can have a number of different meanings depending on the intonation with which it is pronounced.
The major varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible, but most people in China who don"t speak Mandarin as their first language, can speak or at least understand it. However in HongKong and Macau few people speak Mandarin, so they tend to use English to communicate with people from other parts of China.
Each of the major varieties of Chinese has numerous dialects. For example, Mandarin can be divided into northern, southern and south-western dialects, which are more or less mutually intelligible.
Major varieties of Chinese include Mandarin (Pu Tong Hua), Cantonese(Yue), and Southern Min (Min Nan). Mandarin is spoken by possibly more people than any other language ; over billion. It is the main language of government, the media and education in China and one of the four official languages in Singapore.
Cantonese is spoken by about 66 million people in Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces and Hainan Island in China. Min Nan is in the south of Fujian Province, Guangdong Province, and southern Hainan Island as well as in the south of Zhejiang and Jiangxi Provinces, Taiwan Province and so on. The total number of speakers is approximately 49 million.

In the Mandarin, there are four basic tones, which are written as follows, using the syllable "ma" as an example
a. First tone: a high, level pitch.
b. Second tone: starting at the mid-range of a speaker's voice, and ending slightly above the first tone.
c. The third tone: a dipping pitch, falling from mid range to low, then rising.
d. Forth tone: a sharply falling pitch, starting near the top of the speaker's range and reaching mid to low-level at the end.
There are approximately four hundred syllables types in Chinese, so theoretically four tones increases the inventory of sounds to 1, 600.