Settings for Chinese Poetry

In the 20th century, written Chinese diverged into two canonical forms, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. And there exist wide varieties of spoken Chinese for the sake of ryhme.

Written Language

The Written Language code should be from ISO 639-1, and optionally a code of ISO 15924 which is for the representation of names of scripts.

For example, the language code for Chinese is "zh". If you primary written language is Simplified Chinese and what the app to be able to provide Traditional Chinese representation of your poetry, you should declare the written language as "zh-Hans". Likewise, if you draft in Traditional Chinese, then you should declare the written language as "zh-Hant".

Applications of Written Language

The written language defined here will be use to render the lang attribute of appropriate HTML element in the GUI for optimal rendering of fronts. That is, the country code plus the written language sub code like "zh-Hans" or "zh-Hant" will be injected to the container element containing the content.

For other languages, you may be interested in checking:

• Why use the language attribute?
• Choosing a Language Tag
• Language tags in HTML and XML

Spoken Languages

The Spoken Language code should be from ISO-639-3. For example, there are 16 declared spoken languages/dialects for Chinese, and you should pick one like:

1. "yue" being displayed as "粤語"，“广东话” or "广州话".
2. "cmn" being displayed as "國語" or "普通话".
3. "nan" being displayed as "闽南话" or "台語".