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Mandarin, or Beifanghua is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.

In English, Mandarin can refer to two distinct concepts:

to Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu), which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the official spoken language of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the official spoken languages of Singapore. "Chinese" — de facto, Standard Mandarin — is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
to all of the Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China; a term used by linguists.

In everyday use, "Mandarin" refers usually to just Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu). The broader group of Mandarin dialects consists of diverse related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others. It is a grouping defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and consider it distinct from "[Standard] Mandarin"; they may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin" in a broader sense. Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; instead, there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects, due to the wide geographical distribution of its speakers.

This article will focus on the wider sense of Mandarin — a large grouping of diverse northern and southwestern Chinese dialects, rather than just Standard Mandarin.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.