Singapore. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau (alongside English and Portuguese respectively), where it is the dominant variety of Chinese rather than Mandarin. Overseas communities Overseas Chinese and Chinese-speaking communities are found worldwide, with the most sizable concentrated in much of Southeast Asia and some countries in the Western World, particularly the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and France. The usage and varieties of Chinese among the Chinese diaspora is usually dependent on various factors, mostly the ancestral region of the dominant Chinese group and official language policy of the country of residence. In Southeast Asia, Cantonese and Hokkien are the dominant variants of Chinese, with the former traditionally serving as a lingua franca amongst most ethnic Chinese in the region. In Western countries with large ethnic Chinese populations, more established Chinese communities use Cantonese, although Mandarin is increasingly spoken by newer arrivals. Malaysia is the only country outside of the Chinese-speaking world that permits the usage of Chinese as a medium of instruction. This is largely influenced by the fact that Malaysian Chinese comprise nearly a quarter of the country's population and have traditionally been highly influential in the country's economic sector. While Mandarin is the variant of Chinese used in Chinese-language schools, speakers of Hokkien form a plurality in the ethnic Chinese population and Cantonese serves as the common language, especially in commerce and media. As a foreign language With the economic and political rise of the Sinophone world since the latter half of the 20th century, particularly China itself starting in the 1980s, Mandarin Chinese has increasingly become a popular foreign language throughout the world. While not as widespread as a standard foreign language at the scale of English, French, Spanish, or German, student enrollment rates and courses in Mandarin have rapidly grown in East and Southeast Asia and Western countries. Besides standard Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, in part due to the global economic importance of Hong Kong and its widespread presence in significant Overseas Chinese communities. Statistics Ethnologue estimates the total number of Sinophones at about 1.4 billion worldwide as of 2020, the vast majority (1.3 billion) of whom are native speakers. The most spoken branch of Chinese is Mandarin with 1.12 billion speakers (921 million