You may have encountered many situations where people refer "Chinese" as Mandarin. This is somehow confusing. Based on small research that I have done, Mandarin is not actually a name of a language. It refers to one of seven Chinese dialects, the Beijing dialect, which becomes the official language in China. It is generally called "Mandarin Chinese" or "Mandarin". It is called Putonghua 普通話 in China, Guoyu 國語 in Taiwan and Huayu 華語 in Singapore.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share this article if you like. If you have any opinions, please leave a comment. I love reading them.
Photo credit
hapsnaps Flickr via Compfight cc