What is the hottest new language class at high schools across the country? Chinese. A small, but steadily growing number of schools are teaching Mandarin---the most widely spoken language in China.

One-fifth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Now, students at 200 American high schools are trying to learn.

Since China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Chinese has become an increasingly popular subject of study in the  western world.

In1991 there were two thousand foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates has risen sharply to 117,660.        

About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial. As a language family Chinese has an estimated nearly 1.2 billion speakers; Mandarin Chinese alone has around 851 million native speakers, outnumbering any other language in the world.

Mandarin is the official standard language used by China, the Republic of China (on Tai wan), and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.