- ISO 639
zh- Its own name
- 中文
- Script
- CJK
- Direction
- Left to right
Chinese
Chinese (中文) is spoken by 1.3B people across 20 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 5 of them. China holds 96% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Chinese covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
1.3B
China 96% · Taiwan 2% · Hong Kong SAR China 1%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 20 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
1.2B
0%100%
90% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
96%
0%100%
One market with a diaspora: China holds 96% of speakers. Take the tone and conventions from there.
Territories
20
5 where it is official nationally, 5 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$75.2T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.20×
1.0×1.6×+
About 20% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. It feeds the budget estimator.
Where Chinese is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChinaCN | 90% | 1.3B | 1.2B | official |
| TaiwanTW | 95% | 22.4M | — | official |
| Hong Kong SAR ChinaHK | 100% | 7.3M | 7M | official |
| MalaysiaMY | 17% | 5.9M | 5.8M | minority or diaspora |
| SingaporeSG | 77% | 4.6M | 4.4M | official |
| IndonesiaID | 1% | 2.6M | 1.9M | minority or diaspora |
| United StatesUS | 0.7% | 2.4M | 2.2M | minority or diaspora |
| ThailandTH | 1.8% | 1.3M | 1.1M | minority or diaspora |
| VietnamVN | 1.1% | 1.2M | 979K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 2.7% | 1M | 988.3K | minority or diaspora |
| PhilippinesPH | 0.8% | 863.4K | 580.8K | minority or diaspora |
| Macao SAR ChinaMO | 103% | 663.8K | 596.2K | official |
| AustraliaAU | 2.1% | 562.1K | 540.4K | minority or diaspora |
| United KingdomGB | 0.3% | 205.4K | 196.1K | minority or diaspora |
| BruneiBN | 11% | 54.1K | 52.1K | minority or diaspora |
| MongoliaMN | 1.4% | 45.9K | 39.1K | minority or diaspora |
| French PolynesiaPF | 7.8% | 23.7K | 17.2K | minority or diaspora |
| SurinameSR | 1.1% | 7.1K | 6.2K | minority or diaspora |
| PanamaPA | 0.2% | 5.8K | 4.2K | minority or diaspora |
| French GuianaGF | 2.5% | 5K | — | minority or diaspora |
CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
CJK
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
1
No grammatical plural agreement, so counted messages need one arm.
Rate index
1.20×
Prices about 20% above a mainstream pair.
Engineering note. No grammatical plural. Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia.