Putonghua
//ˌputɔŋˈhwɑ// name, noun
name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 Alternative letter-case form of Putonghua. alt-of
Proper Noun
- 1 Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China; the state-designated national speech of the Han nationality using Beijing pronunciation as the standard pronunciation, Beijing speech as the basic dialect, and the model writing of the modern vernacular prose as the norm for grammar.
"As a mainland China national, the counter for our trial was fluent in English, Putonghua, and the Sichuan dialect, and was familiar with a number of other major Chinese languages such as Cantonese and Hakka."
Example
More examples"I can speak Standard Chinese (Putonghua), Southwestern Mandarin, Wu Chinese, and Spanish."
Etymology
From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation for 普通話／普通话 (Pǔtōnghuà, literally “common speech”).
Related phrases
More for "putonghua"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.