As more people around the world start to study Mandarin, China’s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. Last month it announced that 400 million Chinese, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it well.

That may seem like a lot of people unable to speak their own national language but, as recently as 2007, nearly half China’s citizens were unable to communicate effectively in what is known in Mandarin as putonghua (“common speech”). Some are speakers of ethnic-minority languages such as Uighur or Tibetan, which are unrelated to Mandarin. But others are ethnic Han Chinese whose mother tongue is a Chinese language that isn’t Mandarin.

In Xibian village, near Fuzhou, capital of the south-eastern province of Fujian, most residents can speak Mandarin (with a strong accent). Classes at school are taught in it and most television programmes use it. But day to day, villagers chat, sing, haggle and pray in Min, a language unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. Though there are hundreds of different dialects that are variations of Mandarin, linguists say that Min is one of eight separate Chinese languages spoken within China. These include Cantonese (which is spoken by more people than live in France). They share some lexical and grammatical features with Mandarin, but are roughly as similar as English is to Dutch. They can also be written using Chinese characters, rather as English and Dutch can both be written using the Roman alphabet.

Early education in regional languages is tolerated, as is some broadcasting. But Communist Party mandarins insist on calling them dialects, not languages, in an attempt to create “national unity and homogeneity” and promote the standard language, says Umberto Ansaldo, a linguist at the University of Hong Kong.

Official efforts to spread Mandarin sometimes encounter resistance. In 2010, when the Cantonese-speaking city of Guangzhou hosted the Asian Games and officials ordered local broadcasters to switch to Mandarin for the occasion, hundreds marched in protest. That same year there were protests in Tibet about the forced use of Mandarin in schools. It ain’t just what you say that causes problems, but also the way you say it.

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)