Template:Lang/doc

The purpose of this template is to indicate that a span of text belongs to a particular language. It often makes no visible changes to the text but can prompt web browsers to use a more appropriate font or screen readers to use a particular kind of pronunciation and so on. See § Rationale for more information.

Syntax and usage

     {{lang|language tag|text}}

The language tag should consist of an ISO-639 language code. See the list of ISO 639-1 codes for two-letter codes; if you don't find the language you seek, then refer to the list of ISO 639-3 codes.

The template also supports properly formatted IETF language tags using subtags that identify the language's script, region, and/or variant. The ISO 639 language code is a two- or three-letter abbreviation, in lowercase, of the language's name. French, for example, has the code fr:

• She said: "{{lang|fr|Je suis française.}}" → She said: "Je suis française."

Because all languages represented by two-letter codes in ISO 639-1 can also be represented by their three-letter equivalents in ISO 639-2 and above, it is recommended to use the shortest language tag possible that sufficiently describes the target language. So while French could be represented by ISO 639-2's fra code, use the ISO 639-1 code fr instead. Likewise, script, region, and variant information should be included only when they provide a necessary distinction. For an up-to-date list of available language, script, region, and variant codes, please refer to the IANA's language subtag registry.

By default, this template will place articles into the relevant subcategory of Template:Category link. To suppress this – e.g. when using {{lang}} within a wikilink or the title parameter of a citation – add the parameter |cat=no.

Formatting

Automatic italics

{{lang}} automatically applies italic styling when the text in {{{2}}} is written entirely in the Latn script (the Latin alphabet and its extensions), either when that is the default encoding for the language or when it is triggered by a xx-Latn language code:

• {{lang|fr|Je suis française.}} → Je suis française.
• ''{{lang|fr|Je suis française.}}'' → Je suis française. – external markup is ignored
• {{lang|he-Latn|la'az}} ({{lang|he|לעז}}) → la'az (לעז)
• ''{{lang|he-Latn|la'az}}'' (''{{lang|he|לעז}}'') → la'az (לעז) – external markup is ignored around the he-Latn text, but will incorrectly italicize the Hebrew-character material.

When Latn script should not be italicized, there are multiple approaches: |italic=no – renders {{{2}}} in upright font; italic markup around the template is ignored; italic markup inside the template causes an error message:

• {{lang|fr|Je suis française.|italic=no}} → Je suis française.
• ''{{lang|fr|Je suis française.|italic=no}}'' → Je suis française.
• ''{{lang|fr|Je suis ''française''.|italic=no}}'' → [Je suis française.] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) – italic markup in conflict with |italic=no

|italic=unset – disables template-provided styling; {{{2}}} is styled according to external or internal wiki markup:

• {{lang|fr|Je suis française.|italic=unset}} → Je suis française.
• ''{{lang|fr|Je suis française.|italic=unset}}'' → Je suis française.
• {{lang|fr|''Je suis'' English.|italic=unset}} → Je suis English.

{{noitalic}} can also be used:

• {{lang|fr|Je suis {{noitalic|English}}.}} → Je suis English.

Template:Crossreference

Language-specific templates

There are language-specific versions of this template, such as {{lang-fr}} and {{lang-ru}}, which are intended to be used the first time a language appears in an article. These templates will print the language's name and, when appropriate, italicize their content:

• A '''kremlin''' ({{lang-ru|кремль}}, 'castle') is a major fortified central complex ... → A kremlin (reo Rūhia: кремль‎, 'castle') is a major fortified central complex ...

While {{lang-xx}} templates output text in italics for languages with Latin-based scripts, if plain text is required, such as for proper names, |italic=no or {{noitalic}} may be used:

• the border town of Ventimiglia ({{lang-fr|Vintimille}}) → the border town of Ventimiglia (reo Wīwī: Vintimille‎)
• the border town of Ventimiglia ({{lang-fr|italic=no|Vintimille}}) → the border town of Ventimiglia (reo Wīwī: Vintimille‎)
• the border town of Ventimiglia ({{lang-fr|{{noitalic|Vintimille}}}}) → the border town of Ventimiglia (reo Wīwī: Vintimille‎)

When formatting foreign-language text to match style guidelines, it is best to exclude the styling markup from the template, so that any extraneous markup which is not from the foreign language does not receive incorrect metadata for that language. This includes: English-language quotation marks around titles of works in languages that use other quotation character glyphs; italicization of titles in languages which do not use that convention; and emphasis that is not found (in one style or another) in the original foreign text; among other cases. If in doubt, put such markup outside the template when possible.

See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Foreign terms

Right-to-left languages

To embed a string of right-to-left text (such as Arabic or Hebrew) within the usual left-to-right context, |rtl=yes should be added to correctly communicate writing direction. To markup a whole paragraph of right-to-left text, {{rtl-para}} should be used instead.

Any of these approaches will wrap the text in a container with the dir="rtl" attribute. In order to ensure correct rendering in browsers that do not fully support HTML5 bidirectional isolation, a left-to-right mark is also added to the end of the text (see the W3C for details).

Note that text direction does not need to be specified when using the {{lang-xx}} templates, as this is implied by the template's language.

Parameters

the function selector parameter

{{lang}} uses the Lua function lang() Module:Lang. That module also supports all of the {{lang-??}} templates using the Lua functions lang_xx_inherit() and lang_xx_italic(). The module has other functions that may be useful. The function selector parameter |fn= tells module:lang which function to execute. The available functions are:

• is_ietf_tag – returns true if the provided IETF language tag is valid; nil else
  • {{lang|fn=is_ietf_tag|nv}} →true←
  • {{lang|fn=is_ietf_tag|xx}} →←
• is_lang_name – returns true if the provided language name is valid; nil else
  • {{lang|fn=is_lang_name|navajo}} →true←
  • {{lang|fn=is_lang_name|xxxxx}} →←
• lang – the function that renders {{lang}}; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
• lang_xx_inherit – the function that renders {{lang-??}} template where the text is not italicized; can be used when a {{lang-??}} template, for example {{lang-aao}}, does not exist for a particular language:
  • {{lang|fn=lang_xx_inherit|code=aao|Algerian Saharan Arabic text}} → Algerian Saharan Arabic: Algerian Saharan Arabic text
• lang_xx_italic – the function that renders {{lang-??}} template where the text is italicized; can be used when a {{lang-??}} template, for example {{lang-svc}}, does not exist for a particular language:
  • {{lang|fn=lang_xx_italic|code=svc|Vincentian Creole English text}} → Vincentian Creole English: Vincentian Creole English text
• name_from_tag – returns the language name associated with the provided IETF language tag:
  • {{lang|fn=name_from_tag|apa}} → Apache languages
• tag_from_name – returns the ISO 639 language code (sometimes IETF language tag) associated with the provided language name:
  • {{lang|fn=tag_from_name|havasupai}} → yuf-x-hav
• transl – the function that renders {{transl}}; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
  • {{lang|fn=transl|ar|DIN|al-Ḫawārizmī}} → al-Ḫawārizmī

Indicating writing script

If necessary, an ISO 15924 script code can be appended to a language code to indicate the use of a specific script. For instance, Tajik (tg) is a language which can be found written in Arabic (Arab), Latin (Latn), and Cyrillic (Cyrl) scripts, making it necessary to always specify which script is in use. In such a case, taking care to preserve the script code's capitalization, we could end up with the following code (language tags in bold):

• Tajik ({{lang|tg-Arab|تاجیکی}}, ''{{lang|tg-Latn|toçikī}}'', {{lang|tg-Cyrl|тоҷикӣ}})

Tajik (تاجیکی, toçikī, тоҷикӣ)

Many languages, however, are so commonly written in one particular script that specifying the script is unnecessary. Russian, for instance, is almost exclusively written in Cyrillic, so there is no need to specify ru-Cyrl, just as en-Latn would be unnecessary for English. The subtag registry contains up-to-date information on which languages have common script codes that should be "suppressed".

Transliteration

To mark a language which has been transliterated from one script into another, append the new script's code to the code of the original language. So if transliterating from Russian Cyrillic to a Latin script, the language tag on the transliteration would be ru-Latn. If the transliteration scheme is known, and listed as a "variant" in the subtag registry, it can be appended after any script and region codes. For example, Chinese transliterated into a Latin script using the pinyin system would be zh-Latn-pinyin. As a convenience for transliterating to Latin scripts, and to work around browser styling issues with some language and script combinations, {{transliteration}} may be used in place of {{lang}}:

• Moscow ({{lang|ru|Москва}}, {{transliteration|ru|Moskva}}) → Moscow (Москва, Template:Transliteration)

To specify a transliteration scheme, such as the ISO transliteration standard for Cyrillic, use {{transliteration|ru|ISO|Moskva}}.

Undetermined language

The {{lang}} template is not only used to specify the language of foreign words, but can also be used to specify a single symbol or character in a script, unrelated to any specific language. Many times the character or symbol is used in several languages, but when the article refers to the grapheme itself, the ISO 639‑2 language code und, for Undetermined language, should be used:

• The {{lang|und-Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes.

The 字 Han character has 6 strokes.

Han characters are used in Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese, and in this case the character is not used for any specific language. Note that the script code used is Hani, which specifies generic Han characters (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja).

Compare {{script}} usage:

• The {{script|Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes.

The 字Template:Script/doc/id-unk Han character has 6 strokes.

Languages with no code

Use the code "mis" (Miscellaneous) for any language not listed in ISO-639.

Indicating regional variant

When it is necessary to indicate region-specific language, an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, or UN M49 region code, should be added to the language tag, taking care to preserve capitalization. For example, Portuguese (pt) as used in Brazil (BR) could be represented as pt-BR, and Spanish as used in Latin America as es-419.

Additionally, language, script, and region codes can all appear in the same tag. For instance, the code zh-Hant-TW should be used for Chinese text written with Traditional Han characters, containing words or expressions specific to Taiwan:

• Taiwan ({{lang|zh-Hant-TW|臺灣}}, {{transliteration|zh|Táiwān}})

Taiwan (臺灣, Template:Transliteration)

Private-use language tags

This template supports various private-use IETF language tags. Private-use tags contain the -x- singleton and are used by the template to identify languages that are different, for one reason or another, from the base language identified by the ISO 639 language tag.

Supported private-use IETF language tags

Language	Private-use tag
Aeolic Greek	grc-x-aeolic
Ammonite	sem-x-ammonite
Aramaic	sem-x-aramaic
Attic Greek	grc-x-attic
Biblical Greek	grc-x-biblical
Byzantine Greek	grc-x-byzant
Canaanite languages	sem-x-canaan
Classical Greek	grc-x-classic
Colognian	ksh-x-colog
Demotic Egyptian	egy-x-demotic
Doric Greek	grc-x-doric
Dumaitic	sem-x-dumaitic
East Central German	gmw-x-ecg
Eastern Gurage	sem-x-egurage
Hatran Aramaic	sem-x-hatran
Havasupai	yuf-x-hav
Hellenistic Greek	grc-x-hellen
Ionic Greek	grc-x-ionic
Koinē Greek	grc-x-koine
Late Babylonian	akk-x-latbabyl
Late Egyptian	egy-x-late
Medieval Greek	grc-x-medieval
Medieval Latin	la-x-medieval
Middle Assyrian Akkadian	akk-x-midassyr
Middle Babylonian Akkadian	akk-x-midbabyl
Middle Egyptian	egy-x-middle
Milanese	lmo-x-milanese
Neo-Assyrian Akkadian	akk-x-neoassyr
Neo-Babylonian Akkadian	akk-x-neobabyl
New Latin	la-x-new
Old Akkadian	akk-x-old
Old Assyrian Akkadian	akk-x-oldassyr
Old Babylonian Akkadian	akk-x-oldbabyl
Old Catalan	ca-x-old
Old Egyptian	egy-x-old
Old Prussian	prg-x-old
Old South Arabian	sem-x-oldsoara
Palmyrene Aramaic	sem-x-palmyren
Patristic Greek	grc-x-patris
Proto-Algonquian	alg-x-proto
Proto-Celtic	cel-x-proto
Proto-Germanic	gem-x-proto
Proto-Greek	grk-x-proto
Proto-Indo-European	ine-x-proto
Proto-Indo-Iranian	iir-x-proto
Proto-Iranian	ira-x-proto
Proto-Italic	itc-x-proto
Proto-Semitic	sem-x-proto
Proto-Slavic	sla-x-proto
Ripuarian	mis-x-ripuar
Taymanitic	sem-x-taymanit
Walapai	yuf-x-wal
Yavapai	yuf-x-yav

Links

If the {{lang}} template will have to be combined with links one might be tempted to move the {{lang}} template into the link so that it would only frame the link's text label, not the syntax elements of the links or other stylistic elements of some types of links. However, this does not work. The {{lang}} will have to wrap the entire link, regardless if it is an internal or external link, or a link provided through a {{ill}} interwiki link template:

Works:

• {{lang|en|[[Book of hours]]}} → Book of hours
• {{lang|de|[[Book of hours|Stundenbuch]]}} → Stundenbuch
• {{lang|he-LA|{{ill|Machsor Lipsiae|de}}}} → Template:Ill

Does not work:

• [[{{lang|en|Book of hours}}]] → [[Book of hours]] (never works)
• [[Book of hours|{{lang|de|Stundenbuch}}]] → Stundenbuch (does not work in article space, works on talk and some other types of pages)
• {{ill|Machsor Lipsiae|de|lt={{lang|he-LA|Machsor Lipsiae}}}} → Template:Ill (does not work in article space, works on talk and some other types of pages)

Rationale

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Foreign terms requires the use of {{lang}} instead of manual ''italics''. This is preferred for the following reasons:

• Web browsers can use the information in such multilingual support templates to choose an appropriate font.
  • This is great for CJK where a character can be given its language-specific shape but will fall back to another form if no appropriate font is found or if the preferred font lacks that character, for example because the language does not make use of that character: see Han unification § Examples of language-dependent glyphs and these comparison tables with a screenshot.
• For accessibility – screen readers need language info to speak text in the correct language – and to satisfy Wikipedia accessibility guidelines.
• For spell checkers and grammar checkers, to match the text to the dictionary and syntax of the correct language.
• To prevent the page from showing up on the Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss/not English report, which flags articles needing translation.
• To help browsers choose appropriate quotation marks, and make decisions about hyphenation, ligatures, and spacing.
• Users can apply styles to languages in their style sheets (useful for editors).
• Search engines can use this information when indexing text.
• Facilitates better data-scraping, parsing and re-use.
• Useful for application developers who re-publish Wikipedia (also see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Other languages).
• Useful for research or compiling statistics about language use in Wikipedia.

Applying styles

Registered users can apply custom CSS styles to articles by placing style declarations in their user style sheet. The user style sheet can be created at Special:Mypage/common.css. For more information, see Help:User style. The following examples should work in most modern browsers.

To apply a specific font to all text marked as Russian of any script or region:

[lang|=ru] { font-family: fonteskaya; }
/*   or   */
:lang(ru) { font-family: fonteskaya; }

To apply a specific font to text marked simply as Russian:

[lang=ru] { font-family: fonteskaya; }

To apply a color to all text marked with any language:

[lang] { color: green; }

If a font name contains characters besides basic Latin letters or hyphens, it is a good idea to enclose it in quotation marks because some such characters have special meanings (the most common case needing quotation marks is a multi-word font name with space characters). Quotation marks are also required for font families containing generic-family keywords ('inherit', 'serif', 'sans-serif', 'monospace', 'fantasy', and 'cursive'). See the W3C for more details.

You can combine this with font imports in your user stylesheet, for example, to show all German text in Fraktur and all Urdu in Noto Nastaliq Urdu Regular:

@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=UnifrakturMaguntia);
@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/earlyaccess/notonastaliqurdudraft.css);

:lang(de) {
   font-family: UnifrakturMaguntia;
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: normal;
}

:lang(ur) {
    font-family: "Noto Nastaliq Urdu Regular", "Noto Nastaliq Urdu";
}

then the following wikitext will look like the image below:

Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich

{{lang|de-Latf|Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich}}

ٹھنڈ میں، ایک قحط زدہ گاؤں سے گزرتے وقت ایک چڑچڑے، بااثر و فارغ شخص کو بعض جل پری نما اژدہے نظر آئے۔

{{lang|ur|ٹھنڈ میں، ایک قحط زدہ گاؤں سے گزرتے وقت ایک چڑچڑے، بااثر و فارغ شخص کو بعض جل پری نما اژدہے نظر آئے۔}}

Tracking categories

• Category:Lang and lang-xx template errors (1)
• Category:Lang and lang-xx code promoted to ISO 639-1 (0)
• Category:Lang and lang-xx using deprecated ISO 639 codes (0)

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. Click here to see a monthly parameter usage report for this template based on this TemplateData.

TemplateData for Lang

Indicate that a given span of text belongs to a particular language. Allows browsers to correctly present and pronounce foreign languages.

Template parameters

This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Language tag	1 code	A language tag, or an ISO 639 language code. Example fr	String	required
Text	2 text	The text belonging to the language specified. Example Je suis française.	String	required
Right to left	rtl	Indicates that the language should be displayed from right to left. Default no Example yes	String	optional
Italicize	italic italics i	Italicizes the text Default yes Example no	Boolean	optional
Font-size	size	sets font-size Example 120%, 1.2em	Unknown	optional
cat	cat	no description	Unknown	optional
nocat	nocat	no description	Unknown	optional

See also

• {{Lang-x}}
• {{IPA}}
• {{Title language}}
• Category:Wikipedia multilingual support templates
• Lists of ISO 639 codes (language codes)
  • {{ISO 639 name}}
• List of ISO 15924 codes (script codes)
• List of ISO transliterations (transliteration codes)
• {{cleanup lang}} (for articles which should use this template, but do not yet)
• {{transliteration}} (for romanisation of languages not natively written in the Latin alphabet)
• {{script}} (for specific characters)
• {{wikt-lang}} (to simultaneously tag text as a language and link to Wiktionary)
• {{in lang}} (for visually marking external links to foreign-language content)
• {{mw lang}} (similar to {{ISO 639 name}} for MediaWiki-supported languages)
• {{interlanguage link}}

External links

• W3C
  • Language tags in HTML and XML – Overview
  • Authoring Web pages
  • Understanding the New Language Tags
  • FAQ: Styling using the lang attribute
• IANA
  • IANA Language Subtag Registry
  • Tags for Identifying Languages (Template:IETF RFC)
  • Matching of Language Tags (Template:IETF RFC)
  • Language tags (obsolete per Template:IETF RFC)
• Mozilla Firefox
  • Bug with script selection