I know that Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand historically originate from the southern provinces. Not sure about the community in Australia but maybe also to some extent. Well, so how fluent are their young people in Mandarin nowadays? Would they have any trouble talking to people on a visit to Beijing?
As a Singaporean, well, the quality of spoken Mandarin varies widely. For example, my Mandarin is completely shit. 
I did go to Shanghai a few years ago, and was generally intelligible, I think. Getting around wasn’t a problem, but having an in depth conversation on a technical subject would be way beyond me.
I have a number of Chinese-Thai and Chinese-Malaysian friends. None of the Thais seem to speak any Chinese, and the level among the Malaysians ranges from completely fluent to practically non-existent. Anecdotal, but there you go.
As others have said, it varies. Some of our graduates are fluent enough in Mandarin to act as guides/interpreters to visiting Chinese delegations.
Very few people I know here speak Chinese. Mostly Chinese nationals, such as the wife’s uncle or, before she died, her mother. (Mandarin’s not involved in those example, but rather the Chiu Chow dialect). Her father, too, could speak only Chinese (again, Chiu Chao). He was ostensibly Thai, born here, but sent back to China as a child and raised there. Never learned Thai. (A family rumor is he was adopted and so not in the least Thai after all. It’s true he bore little resemblance to his supposed siblings.) No one else in the family speaks any Chinese. Certainly not the wife.
I would not say the ethnic Chinese in Thailand came from the southern provinces. They largely came straight to Bangkok from China.
Most Chinese Indonesians under 40 do not speak any Chinese at all. Things were very rough for the ethnic Chinese there in the 60s, and the use of the language and the practice of Chinese culture was severely frowned upon, to put it mildly.
I still recall flying into Indonesia back in the day and reading the warnings that Chinese-language printed matter was illegal. Not so anymore, though.
This is all ancedotal.
Where the SE Asia Chinese diaspora exists, very very few of the Chinese speak Mandarin as a first language or as their native Chinese dialect. As one would expect, most of the SE Asia Chinese diaspora was led by sea faring coastal Chinese in the Southern part of China (Sam, earlier comment meant China and not southern Thailand 
), eg Cantonese, Hakka, Fukien and for some reason the Chiu Chow. Even within these broad dialects, most of the diaspora speak only the local local dialect, for example they may speak Toi Shan Cantonese and not really understand what people speak in Hong Kong.
Singaporean Chinese speak the best Mandarin as a rule, but it’s rarely business level or technical level. It’s rare I find a Singaporean that can speak at my level. Lee Kwan Yu started the “Speak Mandarin” campaign IIRC in the early 1990’s to align Singapore as an interface with China. Because of that, most Singaporean Chnese can handle basic communication in Mandarin.
I’ve had hit and miss luck finding taxi driver Mandarin.
It’s the same old same old, first generation kids lose a lot of the language skills and probably don’t know how to read and write. And reading and writing Chinese is about 99% required to gain real fluency. Second generation kids maybe are conversational and maybe not.
As Waffle pointed out, most of the Chinese that do speak Mandarin have gone to Chinese school. It’s inconvenient, politically incorrect or potentially even dangerous to do so in much of SE Asia.
D’oh!:smack:
are those people of SE Asian Chinese diaspora who don’t know fluent Mandarin likely to be familiar with the Chinese writing system, e.g. to the point of reading community newspapers or browsing the web? Or do the reading/writing skills go together with the Mandarin skills there, so that both are relatively uncommon?
Also anecdotal:
I’m in China right now, and my project manager/interpreter here is Singaporean. Although she complains that her Mandarin is not native-level, she still manages to essentially run a 12 person department. And, while she writes in her own notes in English, she’s quite capable of reading and typing business-level Mandarin (I’ve never seen her write Chinese, and if she’s like a lot of the Japanese I know, she isn’t nearly at good as writing as she is at typing).
More broadly speaking, I had dinner last night with a number of government people involved in education here in Shandong Province. They observed that “foreign” Chinese people (i.e., ethnic Chinese from other countries, mostly in Asia) required just as many Mandarin classes as non-Chinese, a situation that had initially surprised them. On the other hand, they were impressed that of the 40 teachers we brought over from Canada last year, five of the non-Chinese spoke passable Mandarin.
Is it true that more people in the world speak Mandarin than speak English?
Don’t get me wrong, learing Mandarin is very common here - in fact, it is part of the primary/secondary school curriculum. Most Singapore Chinese will have at least a conversational level of Chinese.
There are several Chinese newspapersin Singapore, and by all accounts they are rather widely read. However, most people’s Mandarin tend to be conversational and personal, rather than for business communications. It is, for example, the language of the market, of the street hawker, etc.
When you say “Would they have any trouble talking to people on a visit to Beijing?”, what do you mean? Ordering a meal? Discussing quantum physics or politics? Asking directions and chatting about the weather?
Probably.
According to Wikipedia, about 850 million people speak Mandarin. The same source cites Ethnologue to say that the second most spoken language is Spanish at 700 million, with English sliding in at 600 million.
Note, of course, that native speakers are not the same as these figures quoted here. In China, a great number of Mandarin speakers have a different mother tongue.
More anecdotal stories.
The Chinese at the Singapore branch of my previous company ranged from fluent to not as much for Mandarin, which they explained depended if they went to Chinese schools or not. Those who went to Chinese schools could read and write, while those who didn’t weren’t as fluent with the written language as well.
Some of our friends are Malay Chinese, and they also differ in fluency. One friend is really good. She went to at least Chinese elementary school, but her sister who went to English school isn’t as good.
My wife said she found many people in Mayasia who spoke fluent Mandarin. She was also able to mostly understand the ones from Fujian, as their dialect is close to Tawanese.
I once, in the 70-ties, met a Chinese girl in London who told me that when she grew up in Malaysia her family were Mandarin speakers but all other Chinese were Cantonese, the official language was Malay but all the non-Chinese around spoke yet another language, so she had to keep up all four languages. And when she moved to England she had to learn English.
The Ethnologue estimates for first-language speakers are at http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size
Summarising that:
- Chinese – 1,213 million, of whom 845 million have Mandarin as their first language.
- Spanish – 329 million
- English – 328 million
- Arabic – 221 million
If you add second-language speakers, English moves up. How far it moves up will depend on what fluency you require: at moderate fluency, it might have moved up to 1,500 million, and have pulled ahead of Mandarin by then.
I would argue strongly against that Mandarin as a first language stat. Certainly 25 years ago it was no more than 10%. Mandarin fluency has increased tremendously in the past 25 years owing to TV, increased use of Mandarin instruction in schools, and the great migrant worker trend (hundreds of millions of Chinese have left their ancestral villages temporarily or permanently for the first time in recent history).
However, how many really speak Mandarin as a first language can not possibly be 60%+ (depending on definitions). I define it as the language of choice and fluency. For example, here in Shanghai, the under 45 crowd may be considered native Mandarin speakers but their default language is Shanghaiese. They express themselves better in Shanghaiese and often speak Mandarin with an accent.
I can still find people within a few hours drive of Shanghai where they do not understand nor speak Mandarin.
Mandarin as a first or second language is my own guesstimate maybe 80%.