Say Chinese in Chinese.

sorry, don't know how to change font size or why most of my characters above came out too smal to read

try again for clarity, sorry about the tech problems, my first time posting a new topic: 汉语 – common in most of the mainland 普通话 – used less common, for clarity with foreigners, or to distinguish from fangyan 方言 汉族话 – ran into this mostly in Xinjiang, but other places from minority speakers 华人话 – in Tailand ‘Chinatown’ communities 华语 – in Singapore 国语 – in South China (mainland) a good bit, and all over Taiwan or SF (旧金山) 中文 – by academics everywhere.

Interesting topic! Maybe there are so many words because historically there never was one unified spoken Chinese language. Until recently.

Dan, I have to disagree... I hear 中文 a lot, and not just from academics. I definitely hear some of the others a fair amount too, though.

I agree with John. I hear zhong wen a lot. I don't think it has to do with dialects. It has to do with customs of use in certain areas (Singapore has their preferred term Taiwan does, etc.) In China it kind of depends what you want to say. I don't think people say putonghua if they are talking about Chinese in general. They would use that to differentiate between local ways of speaking and "standard Chinese".

I've given up on using 普通话。 Dictionary's to the contrary, the term seems to mean different things to different people. Never had any problems with the other terms, though I admit I don't use 话语 and have never hear the term 华人话。

Yeah, probably overstated by saying 'academics', I guess what I meant is that I heard zhongwen so much in my own academic settings, that hearing the others in conversation outside the classroom really stood out to me. Good point wildyaks, do you notice a difference in context that determines when 中文 sounds more natural to you, or specific situations where you hear 汉语, or others more often? I agree that in practice 普通话 probably has a more narrow use. I do like the signs at tourist sights that say "请讲普通话"

I still find it a little odd for the Chinese to use *语 for foreign languages (英语，德语，法语，日语 etc.) but use 中文 (which I thought carried more cultural / written connotations) instead of 汉语 to refer to their spoken language.

goulniky, You can say 英文, 德文, 法文, 日文, 西班牙文, etc., but they're definitely less common, and are more frequently used to refer to the written language than the spoken language.

汉语 seems to be used more widely up here in Harbin. It's quite rare for someone to use 普通话, but you do here it on occasion. 中国话 is also quite common.