However, the written language can be further subdivided into three forms: simplified, traditional, and informal slang or phonetic. There is also a form called “pin-yin” which is the Chinese language transcribed using a roman spelling.

ZHTW is based on the standardised Mandarin language, whereas ZHHK uses an adapted version of Cantonese, which is standard in Hong Kong, Macau and parts of southern China. One way to tell which variant you are dealing with is to look at the characters used in the document.

zh-hans (= simplified Chinese characters) zh-hant (= traditional Chinese characters) zh-cn (= Chinese language variant, uses simplified characters) zh-tw (= Taiwanese language variant, uses traditional characters)