DHAKA: More than 400 million Chinese are unable to speak the national language Mandarin, and large numbers in the rest of the country speak it badly.

China state media said on Thursday, as the government launched another push for linguistic unity, reports The Straits Times.

China’s ruling Communist Party has promoted Mandarin for decades to unite a nation with thousands of often mutually unintelligible dialects and numerous minority languages, but has been hampered by the country’s size and lack of investment in education, especially in poor rural areas.

Officials have admitted they will probably never get the whole country to be able to speak Mandarin, formally called Putonghua in China, meaning ‘common tongue’, suggesting everyone should be able to speak it.

Education ministry spokesman Xu Mei said that only 70 percent of the country could speak Mandarin, many of them poorly, and the remaining 30 percent, or 400 million people, could not speak it at all, Xinhua news agency reported.

BDST: 2001 HRS, SEPT 05, 2013
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