Language code: zh

Technical information about ISO 639 language code zh

The table below provides technical details for the Chinese language, designated by the zh code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

zh

Name

Official

Chinese

Native

中文

Family
Sinitic
Scripts
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
MandarinWuYueMinXiangGanHakkaJinHuiPinghua
Related languages
TibetanBurmeseYi (Nuosu)QiangKaren
Key facts
Approximately one in six people on Earth speaks a variety of Chinese as their first languageChinese characters number over 50,000, though literacy requires knowledge of about 3,000The language is tonal, with Mandarin having four tones plus a neutral toneGrammatical inflection is minimal—word order and particles convey tense and aspectThe oldest known Chinese written records date back over 3,000 years to oracle bones of the Shang dynasty
Sample phrase

你好,你好吗?

Character encodings

GBK, GB2312, GB18030, Big5, Big5-HKSCS, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, specifically to the Sinitic subgroup. It is the official language of China and the most widely spoken native language in the world. It is written using Simplified (Hans) and Traditional (Hant) scripts. It is estimated that there are around 1,350,000,000 native speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

1.4B

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Chinese speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

zh-Hans Chinese (Simplified)

zh-Hans-CN Chinese (Simplified, China)

zh-Hans-HK Chinese (Simplified, Hong Kong)

zh-Hans-MO Chinese (Simplified, Macao)

zh-Hans-SG Chinese (Simplified, Singapore)

zh-Hant Chinese (Traditional)

zh-Hant-HK Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong)

zh-Hant-MO Chinese (Traditional, Macao)

zh-Hant-TW Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)

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