One-third of Chinese do not speak Putonghua, says Education Ministry

As many as three in 10 of China’s 1.3 billion population are unable to communicate in Putonghua, China’s Education Ministry said during an annual event to promote the official language.

“Thirty per cent of our nation’s population does not speak Putonghua, and out of the 70 per cent of population who possess Putonghua skills, only one in ten can speak Putonghua articulately and fluently,” the Education Ministry revealed in statement published on its official website last week.

That could mean that at least 400 million citizens remain unable to communicate in the language that was made official back in 1955.

“[This shows] the mission to promote Putonghua still faces tremendous difficulties,” the ministry said on the 17th anniversary of its first annual event to promote Putonghua.

Standard Putonghua is based on the traditional dialect used in Beijing, and is modified from a northern Han dialect, one of China’s seven major dialects used by ethnic Han Chinese. Notable traditional examples include Cantonese, Hokkien, and Wu.

Other minority ethnic cultures in China also have their own dialects, which in various degrees differ from Putonghua.