Template:Lang/doc

The purpose of this template is to indicate that a given span of text belongs to a particular language (see language code). It often makes no visible changes to the text, but can help web browsers choose the right font, screen readers use the right pronunciation and more.

Text

Use ISO 639 language codes. Example (where fr is the code for French):


 * She said: "Je suis française."

Results in your browser:
 * She said: "Je suis française."

There are also versions of this template for specific languages that also print the language's name, intended to be used the first time that language is used in the article. For example, "" and "" gives "Español" and "русский язык".

Language subtags can also be used to indicate writing script or regional variation of a language. According to the W3C, "The golden rule when creating language tags is to keep the tag as short as possible", so such subtags should only be added if there is an important reason to use them. ISO 639-1 is preferred over ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3.

Indicating writing script
If necessary, add the ISO 15924 code to indicate the script.

For example, Russian is usually written in the Cyrillic alphabet, therefore the 'Cyrl' script code is superfluous and the language code will be ru instead of ru-Cyrl. However, when that text is transliterated the Latn code (latin script) should be used because it isn't the default script for Russian: ru-Latn. Example:

which is the same as
 * Moscow (Russian: Москва́, Moskva)
 * Moscow (Москва́, Moskva)

Results in your browser:
 * Moscow (Москва́, Moskva)

Moskva is equivalent to Moskva. To specify you are using the ISO 9 transliteration of Cyrillic, use Moskva :
 * Moscow (Москва́, ISO 9: Moskva)

IANA maintains a list specifying when the script tag should be suppressed. In some cases, the script must be always specified, like Tajik which can be equally written in Arabic, Latin or Cyrillic alphabets: Which results in your browser: Note the use of rtl-lang instead of lang when using the Arabic script (see below section writing direction).
 * Tajik (تاجیکی, tojikī, тоҷикӣ)
 * Tajik (تاجیکی, tojikī, тоҷикӣ)

Undetermined language
The template is not only used to specify the language of foreign words, but also to specify a single symbol or character in a specific script, for example when discussing about a specific writing system. Many times the character/symbol is used in several languages, but when the article refers to the grapheme itself the ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 language code und for Undetermined language. For example:

The 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 The Han character has 6 strokes.
 * The Han character has 6 strokes.

Indicating regional variant
In some cases, maybe it will be needed to add ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes (specific usage of that country). Of course the three codes can appear in the same tag, for example the code zh-Hant-TW</tt> will be used for Chinese text written with Traditional Han characters, containing words or expressions specific to Taiwan. zh-Hans</tt> is for simplified. Examples:


 * 臺灣

Results in your browser:
 * 臺灣

Writing direction
rtl-lang is a specific template for right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew.

For right-to-left paragraphs (as opposed to rtl strings embedded in an English paragraph), use rtl-para.

Rationale

 * Web browsers can use the information 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 this comparison table and screenshot.
 * For accessibility purposes: screen readers need language info to speak text in its correct language.
 * For spell checkers and grammar checkers.
 * To help browsers choosing appropriate quotation marks, and making decisions about hyphenation, ligatures, and spacing.
 * Users can apply styles to languages in their style sheets (useful for editors).
 * Google and other search engines can use this information when indexing text.
 * Facilitates better data-scraping. parsing and re-use.
 * Could be useful for application developers who re-publish Wikipedia.
 * Could be useful for research or compiling statistics about language use in Wikipedia.

Applying styles
You can apply CSS styles in your user style sheet. Registered users can put styles into User:XXX/monobook.css, where XXX is the user name.

These examples may work in Internet Explorer 8; prior versions do not support attribute selectors. Alternatively, try another browser such as Firefox.

Example: to apply a font to Russian-language text:

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

Example: to apply a colour to text marked with any language:

span[lang] { color: green; }

Do not use quotation marks in your user style sheet; Wikitext will screw them up. They are recommended in CSS, but not required.