Does ChatGPT work in Turkish? Can it handle Japanese? What about Swiss German?
ChatGPT can respond in many languages, but there is no simple, exhaustive count covering every language, dialect and regional variety. A fluent answer can still contain mistakes.
Three separate questions matter when you use it. Which language do the menus use? Which language should the answer use? And can you access the service from your country?
- Choose the interface language in settings and specify the response language in your conversation.
- OpenAIās language-settings list names 59 languages in addition to the English interface. It is not a complete inventory of language capabilities.
- The world map follows the official ChatGPT country list and distinguishes regional exceptions from places with no clear data match.
1. How many languages does ChatGPT support?
A claim such as ā99 languagesā looks precise. It often mixes standard languages with dialects and regional varieties, though. OpenAIās language-settings help page provides a specific list for the user interface.
That list contains the following 59 languages. English is also available as an interface language, although it is not separately named in the help pageās list.
Languages in OpenAIās interface-language list. Checked September 9, 2026.
A language missing from this list is not necessarily beyond ChatGPTās text capabilities. Equally, translated menus do not establish how accurately it will answer every question in that language.
How do I change ChatGPTās language?
On the web, sign in and open Profile > Settings > General > Language. In the mobile app, open the sidebar, select your profile and find Language under App. Automatic detection follows your browser or device language.
For the response itself, specify the language in your prompt. You can paste a source text in one language and ask for an answer in another.
Translate the following text into British English.
Use a polite, natural tone.
Preserve the name, amount, date and time.
Return only the translation.
Text:
Guten Tag Frau Weber, Ihr Termin ist am 18. September um 14:30 Uhr.
Die Beratung kostet 120 EUR.Check the appointment details, price and form of address afterwards. A back-translation can expose discrepancies, but it cannot replace a review by someone who understands both languages. See the ChatGPT prompting guide for more examples.
2. How well does ChatGPT perform in each language?
It depends on the model and the task. Translating a greeting, explaining a technical document and interpreting a regional expression test different abilities. A single percentage for āgood Englishā would conceal those differences.
The 2023 GPT-4 Technical Report, Figure 5, provides a historical comparison. OpenAI translated MMLU knowledge questions and answers into 26 languages using Azure Translate and evaluated GPT-4 with three examples per task. English supplies the additional reference result.
The translations are part of the experiment itself. Appendix F warns that they can lose nuance. Some proper nouns and the A-D answer labels plus āAnswerā remained in English, which could make questions easier. The scores are therefore not a pure comparison of language proficiency.
Historical GPT-4 results from 2023: accuracy on MMLU knowledge questions, 3-shot.
The 83.7% German result means GPT-4 answered that proportion of the knowledge questions correctly. It does not mean 83.7% of its German sentences or translations were correct. These scores cannot rank language proficiency, writing, or translation quality and cannot be assigned to whichever model you use in ChatGPT today.
For your own task, build a small comparison around representative texts. Decide on evaluation criteria first and, where possible, have reviewers judge outputs without seeing the model name. Look for missing statements, invented details, incorrect terminology and inappropriate forms of address.
3. In which countries is ChatGPT available?
The language of an answer does not establish access. ChatGPT can produce Chinese text, for example, even though China does not appear on OpenAIās supported-country list for ChatGPT.
The country assignments were checked on September 9, 2026. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Egypt and Afghanistan are listed. Ukraine is included with certain regional exceptions.
China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela are absent from the supported-country list and marked unavailable on the map. The source is OpenAIās ChatGPT list for web and mobile access.
Grey areas have no clear match in the source data. The simplified map also omits some small islands and territories. It does not draw the individual areas affected by exceptions within Ukraine.
4. Which programming languages can ChatGPT work with?
You can ask ChatGPT to write, explain and debug code. Common examples include Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, R, SQL and shell scripts. This is a selection, not a closed list of guaranteed language capabilities.
Include the language version, framework and specific task in your prompt. For debugging, provide the exact error and a small code example. Ask for tests and run them in your development environment.
What about HTML, Markdown and XML?
ChatGPT can also work with these formats. HTML and XML are markup languages; Markdown is a lightweight markup syntax. They should not be counted as programming languages in a performance ranking.
Which programming language is ChatGPT best at?
There is no reliable universal answer without specifying a model, benchmark and set of tasks. The use of Python in ChatGPT data analysis does not prove that it solves every Python task better than a task in another language. What matters is whether the output meets your requirements and passes the relevant tests.
