Chinese language can be considered a language or language family. About one-fifth of the world's population, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. According to news reports in March 2007, 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China speak a variant of spoken Chinese. As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicate 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua (commonly called "Mandarin"), outnumbering any other language in the world.