The Chinese language, especially Standard Chinese (Mandarin or Putonghua), is the most widely spoken language in the world with over one billion native speakers. It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and is the official language of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and one of the official languages in Singapore. Chinese is characterized by a tonal pronunciation, an analytical grammar and a logographic writing system with thousands of characters. Despite regional dialects, which can differ greatly from one another, standard Mandarin is used as a unifying language in education and the media. The Chinese language has a writing tradition dating back over 3,000 years.