[Feature Request] Pinyin-based Sorting for Chinese Names

[brycehans]

Imported from monicahq/monica#7776
Originally filed by @Sen-Yao on 2025-07-22
Status when imported: open

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FEATURE REQUEST:

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm experiencing an issue with the "Name sorting" in the Contacts section. For Chinese contacts, the sorting appears to be based on the Unicode order of the characters, rather than the more intuitive Pinyin (phonetic) order. This makes it difficult for Chinese users to quickly locate contacts.

For example, I observed the following sorting order for some common Chinese surnames:
吴 (Wú) - 李 (Lǐ) - 杨 (Yáng) - 林 (Lín) - 王 (Wáng)

This sequence aligns with their Unicode values (U+5434 < U+674E < U+6768 < U+6797 < U+738B), confirming Unicode-based sorting. However, for Chinese users, the expected A-Z sorting for "Last Name" would typically be based on the Pinyin of the surnames (e.g., Lín, Lǐ, Wáng, Wú, Yáng).

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like the "Name sorting" sorting for Chinese characters in the Contacts section to be based on their Pinyin order. This would align the sorting behavior with the common expectations of Chinese users and significantly improve usability for contact management.

Describe alternatives you've considered (optional)

• Manually adding Pinyin fields: One could manually add a Pinyin field for each contact and sort by that field. However, this adds a significant amount of manual data entry and defeats the purpose of an automated, intuitive "A-Z" sort.
• Adding a specific "Chinese Pinyin Sort" option: While a separate sorting option could work, integrating Pinyin-based sorting into the existing "Last Name A-Z" would be a more seamless and expected internationalization feature, especially since "A-Z" implies alphabetical sorting relevant to the language.

Additional context
The current Unicode-based sorting for Chinese surnames, while technically "A-Z" in terms of character codes, does not correspond to the phonetic or alphabetical order that Chinese users would expect. Implementing Pinyin-based sorting would greatly enhance the user experience for the large population of Chinese-speaking users. This is a standard practice in software that supports Chinese character sorting.

[brycehans]

Thanks for taking the time to file this — and to anyone who weighed in later, thanks for that too.

This repository is a community maintenance fork of Monica v4. Its scope is deliberately narrow: keep v4 running on modern PHP, Laravel, and Node; take security patches; and triage the inherited backlog. New features and enhancements — even widely-asked-for ones, even ones with strong design behind them — sit outside that scope. The maintenance roadmap is intentionally short for the same reason.

Closing as out-of-scope on that basis. The upstream discussion remains the canonical record if Monica's eventual successor revisits the idea.