Chinese
Chinese
(中文)
is a Sino-Tibetan language
with approximately 920M speakers speakers.
It is written using the
Han (Simplified variant)
script.
Its BCP 47 language code is zh.
Mandarin Chinese (普通话, Pǔtōnghuā) is the standardized form of Chinese based on the Beijing dialect and is the world's most spoken first language by native speaker count. It is the official language of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan (as Standard Chinese / 國語), and one of four official languages of Singapore.
Chinese is a tonal language with four lexical tones plus a neutral tone. It is written with Chinese characters (hanzi), which represent morphemes rather than phonemes, allowing the written form to be shared across mutually unintelligible spoken varieties.
Writing Systems Used for Chinese
Frequently Asked Questions
What alphabet or script does Chinese use?
What direction is Chinese written?
How many people speak Chinese?
What language family does Chinese belong to?
What is the language code for Chinese?
Language Facts
- BCP 47 Code
- zh
- ISO 639-3
- zho
- Status
- living
- Scope
- macrolanguage
- Speakers
- 920M speakers
- Language Family
- Sino-Tibetan
- Scripts
- 1
- Primary Script
- Han (Simplified variant)
Other Han (Simplified variant) Languages
Data sourced from Unicode CLDR and ISO 639-3. Last updated April 20, 2026.