HTML language codes
There exists an attribute in HTML which specifies what language a webpage (or a portion of a webpage) is written in. This attribute is the lang attribute if you're building an HTML document or xml:lang if you're building an XHTML document. The lang or xml:lang attribute should be used inside the <html> tag. Declaring what language a webpage (or portion of a webpage) is written in is useful for search engines and web browsers.
HTML document:
<html lang="lg">
XHTML document:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="lg" xml:lang="lg">
where lg is the language code for the language that the page is written in. For example, for English it would be en, for Dutch it would be nl, and for Farsi it would be fa. The table below is a reference for the various language codes.
| Language | Code used |
|---|---|
| Abkhazian | ab |
| Afar | aa |
| Afrikaans | af |
| Albanian | sq |
| Amharic | am |
| Arabic | ar |
| Armenian | hy |
| Assamese | as |
| Aymara | ay |
| Azerbaijani | az |
| Bashkir | ba |
| Basque | eu |
| Bengali (Bangla) | bn |
| Bhutani | dz |
| Bihari | bh |
| Bislama | bi |
| Breton | br |
| Bulgarian | bg |
| Burmese | my |
| Byelorussian (Belarusian) | be |
| Cambodian | km |
| Catalan | ca |
| Chinese (Simplified) | zh |
| Chinese (Traditional) | zh |
| Corsican | co |
| Croatian | hr |
| Czech | cs |
| Danish | da |
| Dutch | nl |
| English | en |
| Esperanto | eo |
| Estonian | et |
| Faeroese | fo |
| Farsi | fa |
| Fiji | fj |
| Finnish | fi |
| French | fr |
| Frisian | fy |
| Galician | gl |
| Gaelic (Scottish) | gd |
| Gaelic (Manx) | gv |
| Georgian | ka |
| German | de |
| Greek | el |
| Greenlandic | kl |
| Guarani | gn |
| Gujarati | gu |
| Hausa | ha |
| Hebrew | he, iw |
| Hindi | hi |
| Hungarian | hu |
| Icelandic | is |
| Indonesian | id, in |
| Interlingua | ia |
| Interlingue | ie |
| Inuktitut | iu |
| Inupiak | ik |
| Irish | ga |
| Italian | it |
| Japanese | ja |
| Javanese | jv |
| Kannada | kn |
| Kashmiri | ks |
| Kazakh | kk |
| Kinyarwanda (Ruanda) | rw |
| Kirghiz | ky |
| Kirundi (Rundi) | rn |
| Korean | ko |
| Kurdish | ku |
| Laothian | lo |
| Latin | la |
| Latvian (Lettish) | lv |
| Limburgish ( Limburger) | li |
| Lingala | ln |
| Lithuanian | lt |
| Macedonian | mk |
| Malagasy | mg |
| Malay | ms |
| Malayalam | ml |
| Maltese | mt |
| Maori | mi |
| Marathi | mr |
| Moldavian | mo |
| Mongolian | mn |
| Nauru | na |
| Nepali | ne |
| Norwegian | no |
| Occitan | oc |
| Oriya | or |
| Oromo (Afan, Galla) | om |
| Pashto (Pushto) | ps |
| Polish | pl |
| Portuguese | pt |
| Punjabi | pa |
| Quechua | qu |
| Rhaeto-Romance | rm |
| Romanian | ro |
| Russian | ru |
| Samoan | sm |
| Sangro | sg |
| Sanskrit | sa |
| Serbian | sr |
| Serbo-Croatian | sh |
| Sesotho | st |
| Setswana | tn |
| Shona | sn |
| Sindhi | sd |
| Sinhalese | si |
| Siswati | ss |
| Slovak | sk |
| Slovenian | sl |
| Somali | so |
| Spanish | es |
| Sundanese | su |
| Swahili (Kiswahili) | sw |
| Swedish | sv |
| Tagalog | tl |
| Tajik | tg |
| Tamil | ta |
| Tatar | tt |
| Telugu | te |
| Thai | th |
| Tibetan | bo |
| Tigrinya | ti |
| Tonga | to |
| Tsonga | ts |
| Turkish | tr |
| Turkmen | tk |
| Twi | tw |
| Uighur | ug |
| Ukrainian | uk |
| Urdu | ur |
| Uzbek | uz |
| Vietnamese | vi |
| Volapük | vo |
| Welsh | cy |
| Wolof | wo |
| Xhosa | xh |
| Yiddish | yi, ji |
| Yoruba | yo |
| Zulu | zu |