The language of the future?

China's   is exploding! About 1.4 billion people live there. That’s more than the number of people living in Europe and the United States .

Everything in China is . Many people that in 20 years, China will have the strongest in the world. The country already produces so many things like the clothes you’re . They’re probably from China. And your mobile phone, too.

In China, people speak many different . But everyone can understand one language: Mandarin. It uses , not an alphabet, and there are over 40,000 of them! But most people only use three or four thousand. Can you imagine using a computer with all those characters? Probably not. In the late 1950s, the Chinese a system called ‘Pinyin’. It uses the Roman alphabet, like English, which has made it easier to Chinese words, like these, into a computer.

Mandarin is also the spoken language of China. More people in the world speak Mandarin than speak English, about three as many, and there are Chinese people who speak Mandarin all over the world.

Every day more and more people use Mandarin to . So, in 10 or 20 years will Mandarin become the number one language in the world?