Sinophone, which means "Chinese-speaking", typically refers to an individual who speaks at least onevariety of Chinese (that is, one of theSinitic languages). Academic writers often use the term Sinophone in two definitions: either specifically "Chinese-speaking populations where it is a minority language, excludingmainland China,Hong Kong,Macau, andTaiwan" or generally "Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language".^[1] Many authors use thecollocationSinophone world orChinese-speaking world to mean the Chinese-speaking world itself (consisting ofGreater China andSingapore) or the distribution of theChinese diaspora outside of Greater China.

Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese languages today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it themost spoken first language in the world andsecond most spoken overall.^[2] It is the official variety of Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Meanwhile,Cantonese is the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau and is also widely spoken among significantoverseas Chinese communities inSoutheast Asia as well as the rest of the world.

Theetymology ofSinophone stems fromSino- "China; Chinese" (cf.Sinology) and-phone "speaker of a certain language" (e.g.Anglophone,Francophone).

Edward McDonald (2011) claimed the wordsinophone "seems to have been coined separately and simultaneously on both sides of the Pacific" in 2005, byGeremie Barmé ofAustralia National University andShu-mei Shih ofUCLA. Barmé (2008) explained the "Sinophone world" as "one consisting of the individuals and communities who use one or another—or, indeed, a number—of China-originated languages and dialects to make meaning of and for the world, be it through speaking, reading, writing or via an engagement with various electronic media." Shih (2004:29) noted, "By 'sinophone' literature I mean literature written in Chinese by Chinese-speaking writers in various parts of the world outside China, as distinguished from 'Chinese literature'—literature from China."

Nevertheless, there are two earliersinophone usages. Ruth Keen (1988:231) defined "Sinophone communities" inChinese literature as "the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the U.S." Coulombe and Roberts (2001:12) compared students ofFrench betweenanglophones "with English as their mother tongue" andallophones (in theQuebec English sense) "without English or French as their mother tongue", includingsinophones defined as "Cantonese/Mandarin speakers".

TheOxford English Dictionary does not yet includeSinophone, but records 1900 as the earliest usage of theFrench loanwordsFrancophone for "French-speaking" andAnglophone for "English-speaking". TheFrench language – which first usedSinophone to mean "Chinese-speaking" in 1983 (CNRTL 2012) – differentiatesFrancophone meaning "French-speaking, especially in a region where two or more languages are spoken" andFrancophonie "French-speaking, collectively, the French-speaking world" (commonly abbreviating theOrganisation internationale de la Francophonie).Haun Saussy contrasted the English lexicon lacking an inclusive term likeSinophonie orSinophonia, and thus usingSinophone to mean both "Chinese-speaking, especially in a region where it is a minority language" and "all Chinese-speaking areas, includingChina andTaiwan,Chinese-speaking world".

"Sinophone" operates as a calque on "Francophone", as the application of the logic of Francophonie to the domain of Chinese extraterritorial speech. But that analogy is sure to hiccup, like all analogies, at certain points. Some, but not all, Francophone regions are populated by descendants of French emigrants, as virtually all of Sinophonia (I think) is populated by descendants of Chinese emigrants. Other regions, the majority in both area and population, are Francophone as a result of conquest or enslavement. That might be true of some areas of China too, but in a far more distant past. And at another level, the persistence of French had to do with the exportation of educational protocols by the Grande Nation herself, something that wasn't obviously true of the Middle Kingdom in recent decades but now, with the Confucius Institutes, is perhaps taking form. (2012)^[3]

EnglishSinophonia was the theme of an international conference organized by Christopher Lupke, President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature, and hosted by Peng Hsiao-yen, Senior Researcher in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, (Academia Sinica 2012) on "Global Sinophonia" – ChineseQuanqiu Huayu Wenhua 全球華語文化 (literally "global Chinese-language culture").

In the two decades since the English wordsinophone was coined, it has gone throughsemantic change and increasing usage. Authors currently use it in at least two meanings, the general sense of "Chinese-speaking", and the academic "Chinese-speaking, especially in areas where it is a minority language."Shu-mei Shih, one of the leading academic authorities on Sinophone scholarship, summarized treatments.

In the past few years, scholars have used the termSinophone for largely denotative purposes to mean "Chinese-speaking" or "written in Chinese". Sau-ling Wong used it to designate Chinese American literature written in "Chinese" as opposed to English ("Yellow"); historians of the Manchu empire such as Pamela Kyle Crossley, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Jonathan Lipman described "Chinese-speaking" Hui Muslims in China as Sinophone Muslims as opposed to Uyghur Muslims, who speak Turkic languages; Patricia Schiaini- Vedani and Lara Maconi distinguished between Tibetan writers who write in the Tibetan script and "Chinese-language", or Sinophone, Tibetan writers. Even though the main purpose of these scholars' use of the term is denotative, their underlying intent is to clarify contrast by naming: in highlighting a Sinophone Chinese American literature, Wong exposes the anglophone bias of scholars and shows that American literature is multilingual; Crossley, Rawski, and Lipman emphasize that Muslims in China have divergent languages, histories, and experiences; Schiaini- Vedani and Maconi suggest the predicament of Tibetan writers who write in the "language of the colonizer" and whose identity is bound up with linguistic difference. (2013:8)^[4]

"Chinese-speaking" is theliteral meaning ofsinophone, without the academic distinction of speakers outside ofGreater China.

TheWiktionary is one of the few dictionaries that definesinophone:

• adjective "Speaking one or more Sinitic or Chinese language(s), Chinese-speaking"
• noun "a person who speaks one or more of the Sinitic or Chinese language(s) either natively or by adoption, a Chinese-speaking person."

The wordsinophone has different meanings among scholars in fields such asSinology,linguistics,comparative literature,language teaching, andpostcolonialism.

Recent definitions of the word include:

• The Sinophone encompasses Sinitic-language communities and their expressions (cultural, political, social, etc.) on the margins of nations and nationalness in the internal colonies and other minority communities in China as well as outside it, with the exception of settler colonies where the Sinophone is the dominant vis-à-vis their indigenous populations. (Shih 2011:716)
• The Sinophone world refers to Sinitic-language cultures and communities born of colonial and postcolonial histories on the margins of geopolitical nation-states all across the world. (Cambria 2012)

Chinese is anofficial language of five countries and territories. While Chinese is a group of related languages rather than a single language itself, the governments of nearly all nations and territories where it is official simply designate the ambitious "Chinese" to refer to the official variant used in administration and education, with the exception of Singapore.^[5]

Mandarin is the sole official language of both thePeople's Republic of China (PRC) and theRepublic of China (ROC, Taiwan) as well as one of the four official languages ofSingapore. It is also one of the sixofficial languages of the United Nations.

Cantonese is an official language ofHong Kong andMacau (alongsideEnglish andPortuguese respectively), where it is the dominant variety of Chinese rather than Mandarin.

Overseas Chinese and Chinese-speaking communities are found worldwide, with the most sizable concentrated in much ofSoutheast Asia and some countries in the Western World, particularly theUnited States,Canada,Australia,United Kingdom, andFrance. Theusage and varieties of Chinese among the Chinesediaspora is usually dependent on various factors, mostly the ancestral region of the dominant Chinese group and official language policy of the country of residence. In Southeast Asia, Cantonese andHokkien are the dominantvariants of Chinese, with the former traditionally serving as alingua franca amongst most ethnic Chinese in the region.^[6] In Western countries with large ethnic Chinese populations, more established Chinese communities use Cantonese orTaishanese, although Mandarin is increasingly spoken by newer arrivals.^[7]

Malaysia is the only country outside of the Chinese-speaking world that permits the usage of Chinese as a medium of instruction.^[8] This is largely influenced by the fact thatMalaysian Chinese comprise nearly a quarter of the country's population and have traditionally been highly influential in the country's economic sector.^[9] While Mandarin is the variant of Chinese used in Chinese-language schools, speakers of Hokkien form a plurality in the ethnic Chinese population and Cantonese serves as the common language, especially in commerce and media.^[10]

With the economic and political rise of the Sinophone world since the latter half of the 20th century, particularly China itself starting in the 1980s, Mandarin Chinese has increasingly become a popularforeign language throughout the world.^[11] While not as widespread as a standard foreign language at the scale of English, French, Spanish, or German, student enrollment rates and courses in Mandarin have rapidly grown inEast andSoutheast Asia and Western countries.^[12] Besides standard Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, in part due to the global economic importance of Hong Kong and its widespread presence in significant Overseas Chinese communities.^[13]

Ethnologue estimates the total number of Sinophones at about 1.4 billion worldwide as of 2020, the vast majority (1.3 billion) of whom are native speakers.^[14] The most spoken branch of Chinese isMandarin with 1.12 billion speakers (921 million native speakers), followed byYue (which includesCantonese) with 85 million speakers (84 million native). Other branches of the Chinese language subgroup with over 2 million speakers include:Wu with 82 million (81.7 million native),Min Nan with 49 million (48.4 million native),Hakka with 48.2 million,Jin with 47 million,Xiang with 37.3 million,Gan with 22.1 million,Min Bei with 11 million,Min Dong with 10.3 million,Huizhou with 4.6 million, andPu-Xian Min with 2.5 million.

Below is a table of the Chinese-speaking population in various countries and territories:

Countries/Territories	Speakers	Percentage	Dialects					Year	Reference
			Mandarin	Min	Hakka	Yue	Other/Unknown/ Not specified
Anguilla	7	0.06%						2001	[15]
Australia	1,022,506	4.02%	685,274			295,281	41,944	2021	[16][17]
Austria	9,960	0.12%						2001	[15]
Belize	2,600	0.8%						2010	[15]
Cambodia	94,450	0.61%						2019	[18]
Canada	1,292,640	3.68%	679,255	29,115	9,765	553,380	21,120	2021	[19]
China (mainland)	1,300,000,000	93% (approx.)						2020	[20][21][note 1]
Cyprus	2,179	0.24%						2021	[22]
England and Wales	204,646	0.35%	30,820			55,555	118,271	2021	[23]
Falkland Islands	1	0.03%						2006	[15]
Finland	15,735	0.28%						2022	[24]
Germany	159,000	0.19%						2024	[25]
Hong Kong	6,698,969	93.30%	165,451	98,485	41,514	6,328,947	64,572	2021	[26][note 2]
Indonesia	2,200,000	1.0%						2000	[15]
Ireland	24,709	0.48%						2021	[27]
Isle of Man	349	0.41%						2021	[28]
Lithuania	64	0.002%						2011	[15]
Luxembourg	2,855	0.51%						2021	[29]
Macao	411,482	97.0%	31,405			537,981	36,032	2021	[30][note 2]
Malaysia	6,642,000	23.4%						2016	[15]
Marshall Islands	79	0.2%						1999	[15]
Mauritius	997	0.08%	406		60	17	514	2022	[31]
Nepal	242	0.0009%						2011	[15]
New Zealand	219,888	4.40%	107,412			54,417	58,059	2023	[32]
North Macedonia	13	0.0007%						2021	[33]
Northern Ireland	5,237	0.29%	636		23	1,246	3,332	2021	[34]
Northern Mariana Islands	14,862	23.4%						2000	[15]
Palau	331	1.8%						2005	[15]
Philippines	6,032	0.4%						2000	[15]
Romania	2,039	0.01%						2011	[15]
Russia	17,556	0.01%						2021	[35]
Scotland	26,449	0.50%	4,613	25	99	7,664	14,048	2021	[36]
Singapore	1,388,430	38.61%	1,075,172	216,683		79,216	17,359	2020	[37][note 3]
Slovakia	1,434	0.03%						2021	[38]
South Africa	8,533	0.02%						1996	[15]
Taiwan	21,690,893	99.57%	14,463,896	6,897,535	329,462			2020	[39]
Thailand	111,866	0.2%						2010	[15]
Timor Leste	511	0.07%						2004	[15]
United States	3,531,221	1.12%						2023	[40]
Total	1,345,810,765

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• Shih, Shu-mei (2007),Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, University of California Press.
• Shih, Shu-Mei (2010), "Theory, Asia and the Sinophone",Postcolonial Studies 13.4:465–484.doi:10.1080/13688790.2010.525213
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• Tsu, Jing (2010), "Epilogue: Sinophone Writings and Chinese Diaspora", inStephen Owen andKang-i Sun Chang, eds.,Cambridge History of Chinese Literature 704–712.
• Tsu, Jing (2010), "Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese", in Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds.,Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, Brill.
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Look upSinophone in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Globalizing Modern Chinese Literature: Sinophone and Diasporic Writings conference, Harvard University, December 6–8, 2007.

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