lol , "400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin", lol, BBC??? I think this is nonsense. Maybe some people over the age of sixty can't speak, but basically canunderstand others speak mandarin.Standard Mandarin(Putonghua) is based on the northern Mandarin Han Chinese, Mandarin(not putonghua) is the most widely used in China, population nearly900000000 people. the remaining other Han dialects, accounted for a total of 30% Han people.Like Cantonese, accounted for only 5% of the all Han people,Even in Guangdong Province, there are half of the population r not speak cantonese
Secondly,the India and China differences, China Han people accounted for 90%, India is different, many ethnic, racial. India's largest ethnic hindustani people accounted for much.? In China Cantonese, Shanghai dialect, Hakka, northern dialect, all Han dialects, like the Tibetan language, is also divided into Amdo, Kham dialect, u-Tsang,, and so on, and some tibetan dialect also Can not communicate .
Compared with other languages,w e Han Chinese language the biggest difference is that it is based on the ideographic characters and pictographic characters, even if the pronunciation is different, but still can understand. Any Han people, as long as not illiterate, no matter what kind of dialect he said, can understand Chinese characters, both TV and newspaper, or on the road sign.They can read out. Even if my more than 80 year old grandfather, also can read the characters on the tv.
So the "400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin" is a false proposition.
we unified the characters in two thousand years ago and our text is notalphabetic writing.
Obviously different with India,India has many languages do not belong to the same family。 the most used local languages in India compared to other countries is not dominant, India's most widely implemented is English, and English is the international language, English as the official language, is the most correct choice for india