Devon Maloney. Saturday 30 April 2016 10.53 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.24 EST. Margaret Atwoodâs feminist dystopian classic The Handmaidâs Tale is on its way to a series adaptation â Hulu in charge, Atwood consulting, and Elisabeth Moss starring as the titular handmaid Offred.
Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups, with 70 per cent of Chinese speakers and a huge area stretching from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast.
Mandarin is also one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the eight official languages of the United Nations. From the time China became a nation state in 221 B.C. until the end of Chinaâs last imperial dynasty in 1912, China did not have a single national language. Rather, the Chinese spoke many different languages and dialects that developed organically over the course of several millennia.