Objective To study the characteristics of lanugage areas in Chinese Mandarin-English bilinguals whose first language is Mandarin.Methods 12 healthy volunteers had their BOLD-fMRI scanning with 3 language tasks in Mandarin and English:semantic judgement,phonology judgement and mophology judgement.The images were analyzed by SPM8 software.The lateral index were calculated for each of the bilingual language tasks.Results Most of the traditional language areas were activated by Mandarin or English when the 3 language tasks were performed.The common activation areas of Mandarin include right postcentral gyrus,right inferior parietal lobe,right thalamus,right cerebellum,right cingulate gyrus,left precentral gyrus,left postcentral gyrus,left inferior parietal lobe,left insular lobe,left middle frontal gyrus.The common activation areas of English include right insular lobe,right middle frontal gyrus,right precentral gyrus,right postcentral gyrus,right inferior parietal gyrus,right cingulate gyrus,right cerebellum,right precuneus lobe,left insular lobe,left middle frontal gyrus,left precentral gyrus,left inferior parietal gyrus,left cingulate gyrus.All 3 tasks in Mandarin have left dominances,while only semantic judgement in English has a left dominance.There is no specific language area between Mandarin and English when the 3 language tasks were performed.Conclusions The 3 language tasks activated common and different cortical areas.Chinese Mandarin-English bilinguals had the same system to support two languages in the brain.There was no left dominances when phonological and mophological tasks were performed in English.