User:Charliewanger/sandbox

Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. Because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is also referred to as the "northern dialect(s)". When the Mandarin group is taken as one language, as is often done in academic literature, it has nearly a billion native speakers, more than any other language. A northeastern-dialect speaker and a southwestern-dialect speaker may have difficulty communicating, except through the standard language. Nonetheless, there is much less variation across the huge Mandarin area than between the non-Mandarin varieties of southeast China. This is attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. The capital has been within the Mandarin area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Some form of Mandarin has served as a national lingua franca since the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a standard form based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin dialects, was adopted as the national language. Standard Chinese, which is also referred to as "Mandarin", is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan (Republic of China) and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally.

Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau or in the Kangxi Dictionary. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century (during the Southern and Northern Dynasties.) The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau; as well as in Overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia, although the number of printed materials in simplified characters is growing in Australia, USA and Canada, targeting or created by new arrivals from mainland China. Currently, a large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia in official publications. The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities.

Status
Because of the rapidly increasing number of Mandarin speakers in Toronto, the ability to speak Mandarin is in high demand in the job market in Toronto. Jobs such as interpreters, bank representatives, investment advisors, retail sales associates, etc. Often times, these positions require bilingual or even trilingual skills - the ability to speak English, Mandarin/Cantonese, and French. You can easily notice that usually there is a “Mandarin Chinese” language option on the display screens of bank ATMs and other customer service devices in Toronto. In fact, back in 2009, Interac has signed a deal with China Unionpay, the dominant Chinese bank card network whose members have issued nearly 2 billion cards, that will make it easier for the card holders of those cards to take money out of bank machines in Canada with their Chinese debit cards, and of course, all of the services will be displayed in Mandarin. A lot of banking, service and retail industries added a mandarin touch to their advertisement campaigns. It is easily spotted in Toronto that there is often a Mandarin translation under advertisements of various products and services, such as cosmetics, auto industries, insurance companies, etc. A lot of companies also offer a mandarin version of their official webpage, a new shift from the English/French language option.