Primary Language Attribute in HTML
This article explains how to use the language attribute in HTML.
Introduction
HTML allows you to specify the natural language of your HTML document using the lang
attribute. Using the lang attribute will allow you to display language or
dialog specific content to your viewers based on their web browsers default
language setting. In addition, the language attribute can also help search
engines index your web page.
Primary Language Codes
Defining primary language(s) in the
meta element
In a single HTML document you can declare multiple primary languages but only
one base language. Always define the languages you will be using in the
meta element.
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
The first attribute in the content value corresponds to the base languages
and may be followed by a comma delimited list of additional primary
languages. Let's look at an example. Let's say our HTML document has
a base language of English, but also contains French. Since English is the
base language I must place it first followed by the primary language code for French.
<meta http-equiv="content-language"
content="en,fr">
Primary language Codes Table
|
Language |
Code |
|
Arabic |
ar |
|
Chinese |
zh |
|
Dutch |
nl |
|
English |
en |
|
French |
fr |
|
German
|
de |
|
Greek
|
el |
|
Hebrew
|
he |
|
Hindi
|
hi |
|
Italian
|
it |
|
Japanese
|
ja |
|
Portuguese
|
pt |
|
Russian
|
ru |
|
Sanskrit
|
sa |
|
Spanish
|
es |
|
Urdu
|
ur |
Defining primary language(s) blocks
inside your web page
The primary language attribute may be added to the tag that surrounds a block
of text. For example, <body lang="en"> can be used to
indicate that the primary language for text declared inside the body is
English. In contrast, <p lang="fr"> may be used to
indicate the primary language for text contained within a specific paragraph is
french.
Primary Language Subcodes
You may specifiy a specific dialect by appending a specific subcode to any
given primary language code. This is done by appending ("-" +
subcode) to the primary language code.
The version or dialect of the English language used in the United States of
America is specified by using the "us" subcode. Applying this to
the primary language code "en" for English yields
"en-us". Returning to an earlier example, we would arrive at the
following statement.
<meta http-equiv="content-language"
content="en-us,fr">
|
