Pu tong hua— Erm.. I think it means the primary Chinese dialect (Mandarin)

Hanya— No idea. Unless you mean Han yu, which would mean something along the lines of ‘the Chinese language’.

Putonghua is the language the Communist party picked as the “common” Chinese. It is based on the Chinese spoken in Beijing. That language used to be called “Mandarin Chinese”, but this is not a term Communists would like.

I’m not familiar with Hanya. “Han” is the Chinese word for ethnic Chinese. In other words, if you live in China but happen to be Mongolian or Uighur (Central Asian Caucasian), you are not Han.

Putong hua is literally “common speech” and it is the lingua franca of China. It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a range of northern dialects called “mandarin” (including Henanese, and Shandong dialect). These dialects were called this because “mandarin” means “officials and bureaucrats”, and with Beijing as the capital for many hundreds of years, it was de facto the language of government.

Putong hua is also called “Guo yu” in Taiwan — “national language”. It is essentially interchangeable with putong hua — as is “Han yu”, which is what they call putong hua in Malaysia and Singapore.