Key:name:zh
 name:zh
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The feature’s name in Chinese. Use the locally appropriate Chinese dialect and spelling variant, if applicable. Use more specific keys such as name:zh-Hant (traditional) and name:zh-Hans (PRC) for other variants. 
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| Group: names |
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| Status: de facto |
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A common name in Chinese language.
Note that this tag is useful when object has names specified in more than one language:
- If name=* is in Chinese then it specifies which language is used in main name tag
- If name=* is in a different language then it specifies name in Chinese
Introduction
name:zh=* represent unspecified Chinese variant. Usually the script being used in the tag is the script preferred by either the object owner, frequent users, or the people of the area. In other words, most objects in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore with this tag would have Simplified Chinese value, while most objects in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau would have Traditional Chinese value. Exception applies. Outside Chinese-speaking area the script of value in this key is generally dependent on the script preference of the first contributor in a first-come-first-serve basis and thus different nearby objects might have different scripts in this same tag, but try not to mix different scripts together within one single tag on each individual objects. However, not all editors follow this convention, which can lead to edit wars or mixed names as a result. Therefore, in these areas, Chinese language codes with script codes (Hans / Hant) or/and region codes (CN, HK, MO, TW, SG) are preferred, rather than just name:zh=*. Sometimes when name:zh=* contain one variant of Chinese, another variant of Chinese would be stored in name:zh-Hant=* and/or name:zh-Hans=* for Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese respectively. Otherwise, if it is desirable to render the map in only Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese, then transliterator could be considered, but please pay attention that all machine transliterator between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese available as of today are not totally accurate and misconversion could happens because some Traditional glyph are being separately corresponded to multiple Simplified glyph while there are also some Simplified glyph that are being separately corresponded to multiple Traditional glyph.
As mentioned above, it is better to use name:zh-Hant=* and name:zh-Hans=* to represent the name written in traditional and simplified Chinese than the ambiguous name:zh=*.
Note that Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese should be displayed using different corresponding fonts because for some characters they share the same Unicode code point but represent different glyph in Traditional vs Simplified Chinese. Several characters in the Japanese Shinjitai glyph are particularly different from Simplified Chinese and should therefore be avoided.
Sometimes keys like name:zh-Hans-CN=*, name:zh-Hant-HK=*, name:zh-Hant-MO=*, name:zh-Hans-SG=*, and such would be used for Chinese name of a feature in different area like China (mainland), Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and such, when the feature's name in those regions are not the same as local Chinese name or international Chinese name. It is recommended to capitalize the country/region code (although other variants exists in the OSM database now). These tags usually contain same script in their value as the preferred script in the region they indicate.
A few features have been tagged with keys like name:zh-Hant-CN=* to represent the Chinese name for a region with alternative script.
Fallback
When different names are used in various places, it is better to use language code with script or region. However, in many cases, the name is the same, which may lead to less use of these variant code. Therefore, a fallback list will be necessary when displaying a specific Chinese variant. The following table shows the desired fallback order (from top to bottom):
CN
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SG
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MY
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TW
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HK
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MO
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zh-Hans
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zh-Hant
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zh
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lzh[1]
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ko-Hani[2]
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vi-Hani
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Romanization
The most common romanization scheme in mainland China is Hanyu Pinyin, while in Taiwan, there are Hanyu Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Wade–Giles. Since the wording and pronunciation in mainland China and Taiwan are the same in most cases, name:zh-Latn-pinyin=* is more commonly used.
pinyin
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pinyin
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tongyong
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wadegile
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CN
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TW
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zh-Latn
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Usage statistics for Chinese variants
Chronology comparison of zh, zh-Hant, zh-Hans
Possible tagging mistakes
Maps in Chinese
- Wikimedia Maps (wikimedia.org)
- Wikimedia Maps (toolforge.org)
- OpenStreetMap Americana
- Open Infrastructure Map
- OpenMapTiles – raster and vector tiles (demo)
See also
- Multilingual names #China #Taiwan
- Names – about names in general
- official_name:zh=*
- short_name:zh=*
- alt_name:zh=*
- old_name:zh=*
- loc_name:zh=*
- name:lzh=*
- name:ko-Hani=*
- name:vi-Hani=*
- name:za-Hani=*
- name:zh-Hans=*
- name:zh-Hant=*
- name:zh-Latn-pinyin=*
- name:zh-Latn-CN-pinyin=*
- name:zh-Latn-TW-pinyin=*
- name:zh-Latn-tongyong=*
- name:zh-Latn-TW-tongyong=*
- name:zh-Latn-wadegile=*
- name:zh-Latn-TW-wadegile=*
- name:zh-Bopo=*
External links
- osmnames.netlify.app OSM Localization Tool – a tool for adding names in Chinese
Notes
- ↑ Since the word order of Vietnamese and Chinese are different, this key can be used to represent the Han Nom name written in classical Chinese, which is in line with the Chinese word order.
- ↑ Although Korean is another language, its Han characters are written only slightly differently from traditional Chinese, which is somewhat more traditional than traditional Han characters in various places today. Therefore, name:ko-Hani=* can almost be regarded as traditional Chinese in terms of place names.