Short answer
Technically yes. BIP-39 specifies an English wordlist plus Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Czech, and Portuguese wordlists. In practice, almost every hardware wallet and most dApps only accept the English wordlist. A non-English mnemonic generated today may have nowhere to import five years from now. Unless you have a very specific reason, default to English.
The compatibility problem
BIP-39 was ratified in 2013 with only the English wordlist. Other-language wordlists were added later, but English remains the de facto default. Ledger, Trezor, OneKey, Keystone — all ship with English mnemonics from the factory. Software wallets like MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Phantom, OKX Web3 wallet sometimes claim "Chinese support" in import dialogs, but actual compatibility varies wildly.
The critical point: BIP-39 language wordlists are independent and non-interchangeable. You cannot substitute Chinese words with English equivalents in the same mnemonic. A Chinese-wordlist 12-word seed imported into an English-only wallet is rejected outright because the words don't exist in the expected table.
The hidden NFKD problem
BIP-39 specifies UTF-8 NFKD normalization for non-Latin scripts. Different operating systems handle CJK normalization differently in subtle ways. A mnemonic input on macOS may produce a slightly different derived seed than the same characters typed on Windows. This is a known edge case with no clean fix; it makes Chinese mnemonics fundamentally less portable than English ones.
The recommendation
Generate English. If you do not read English, write the words down phonetically with a transliteration in your local script alongside — but always restore from the official BIP-39 English spelling. For long-term storage, English is the safer choice by a wide margin.