Do more people speak simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese?

in " CHINESE Language "

" Mandarin "

- is the Official one, and also
is the most widely spoken with around 850 million user (worldwide)

you can't speak " Simplified Chinese " & " Traditonal Chinese ",
they are the " Form of Written "

" Simplified Chinese "

- which is usually used now in Mainland China, Singapore....

" Traditional Chinese "

- which was totally used in mainland China before,
and still remaining a lot in Simplified Chinese,

- now is still usually used in HongKong, China; Macao, China; Taiwan; Philippines.....

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here's more information for your reference :

1.> " CHINESE "

means :

-- relating to or belonging to China, or its People, Citizenship, Language or Culture.

-- The Chinese are the people who come from China.

-- The Languages that are Spoken in China,
and by Chinese Peoples within Mainland China & Overseas.

2.> CHINESE language (中文) (Zhōngwén)

- is a language with many dialects.

- it can be written in form of
" Traditional Chinese " or " Simplified Chinese "

- but it can spoke or pronounce in many " Dialects " !

3.> Chinese Dialects

-- It is hard to guess how many dialects are exist, but base of the government records are above 170+ dialects.....

" Mandarin " (官) (Guan) is the Official one.

- it was a local dialect in Northern China (include Beijing -Capital of China); so it also called "北方話" (Běifānghuà) (Northern dialect) or "北京話" (Běijinghuà) (Beijing dialect).

- and later, it spoken across most of northern and south-western China with majority China peoples, then became the "Official Chinese Dialect" that announce by China government.

- and now also known as 汉语/漢語 (Hànyǔ); 华语/華語 (Huáyǔ); 國語/国语 (guoˊ yuˇ ) or 普通話/普通话 (puˇ tong hua)

- and out of many other China dialects.
1. " Mandarin " (官) (Guan), it together with
2. " Yue " (粵) (Cantonese) ,
3. " Man " (閩) (also known as Minnan, Amoy, Hokkien, Fujian, TAIWANESE...)
4. " Wu " (吳) (Shanghainese),
5. " Hakka " (客家),
6. " Xiang " (湘) (Hunanese) &
7. " Gan " (贛)...

are declared by China Government and consider as the
" 7 Major branch of Chinese Dialects " in China,
which used by a large amount of Chinese people
within China and Overseas!

which they can represents about 85+ percent of the total population. ...

4.> Form of Written :

" Traditional Chinese "

- which was totally used in mainland China before,
and still remaining a lot in Simplified Chinese,

- now is still usually used in HongKong, China; Macao, China; Taiwan; Philippines.....

" Simplified Chinese "
( which is usually used now in Mainland China, Singapore.... )

- the mainland China start to invent and try of using "Simplified Chinese" in 1955, is for the reason of more easier to learn and for promote Chinese globally;

- there are several version of "Simplified Chinese" announce by China government and had been cancelled later on ( example: the version announce by mainland China at Dec. 20, 1977 had been cancelled after eight year of trial of usage on jun. 24, 1986; and the newest announcement of "Simplified Chinese" was on oct. 10, 1986 )

and after those trial and error, the latest announcement of "Simplified Chinese" by China government was on October 1986, only for around 23 years; so the generation as old as grandparents was also learned "Traditional Chinese" in their school time at China before. the "Traditional Chinese" is the one had been used for longer time, and still remaining a lot in "Simplified Chinese".

because not not all "Traditional Chinese" are convert or have "Simplified Chinese" version, only those are hard to write, and mainland China Government are now officially use "Simplified Chinese", but not restricted for using "Traditional Chinese" !

- that's the reason why HongKong & Macao are already part of China, and they are still using Traditional Chinese on their official document, newspaper, and on TV !

and also still using by a lot of Oversea Chinese. and used also at their Chinese newspaper. ex. Philippines......

.

All prior answers are excellent.

Just want to add - as spoken language, Mandarin has been used by majority of Chinese speaking population.

For written language/characters, the Traditional Chinese characters have been used since the Tang, Song, Ming, Ching dynasty and are still being used in many part of the world including Taiwan, and Hong Kong. And also are used not as official written language but appears in day-to-day living in Korea, in Japan, and in many Chinese ethic communities in many countries.

Whereas simplified Chinese characters were developed and were made official by the current Chinese government in mainland China. The purpose of simplified Chinese is to make writing and learning Chinese easier. Therefore, to fight the illiteracy issue.

Simplified or traditional refers to the characters used, not the language.

Mandarin Chinese is written with simplified characters in Mainland China, but in Taiwan, they use traditional characters.

Other dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese, also use traditional characters.

I guess you might be asking which Chinese characters you should learn - simplified or traditional.

If you want to read books, magazines published in Mainland China, you should learn simplified Chinese characters.

If you want to read books, magazines published in Taiwan etc., you should learn traditional Chinese characters.

Traditional Chinese characters are far more complicated than simplified characters.

Publishing industries in Mainland China are still under government supervision. So published materials tend to be boring.

you can't speak simplified or traditional
those refer to characters. generally people in mainland china read simplified, and people in taiwan read traditional.

the two main forms of spoken chinese are mandarin and cantonese, but there are a lot of other dialects too.

People don't speak simplified or traditional. That merely refers to the writing system.

That said the majority of Mandarin speakers use simplified writing.

1

china is the one nation to make use of chinese language as its first language, however as im definite you recognize, singapore has a gigantic chinese language populace, like a couple of different southeast asian nations like indonesia, the philipines. hongkong and macau use conventional chinese language, however all the mainland makes use of the simplified one.

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