The most common language in the world, Mandarin, takes its name from mandarin, or scholar-official of the Imperial Chinese government, but only the language needs the capital letter. The tasty mandarin orange also takes the lower case.

Should languages be capitalized?

(c) The names of languages are always written with a capital letter. ... Note, however, that names of disciplines and school subjects are not capitalized unless they happen to be the names of languages: I'm doing A-levels in history, geography and English. Newton made important contributions to physics and mathematics.

Is the C in Chinese capitalized?

Does Chinese need a capital letter? Use capitals for proper nouns. In other words, capitalize the names of people, specific places, and things. For example: The word “country” would not normally be capitalized, but we would have to write China with a capital “C” because it is the name of a specific country.