The Language Attribute

The language attribute helps screen readers pronounce content correctly and provides accurate translations.

Background

The intent of the language, or lang, attribute is to allow user agents to render content more meaningfully based on accepted cultural practice for a given language.

Syntax

The syntax of lang tag is:
Language-Tag = Primary-tag *( "-" Subtag )
Primary-tag = 1*8ALPHA
Subtag = 1*8ALPHA
Examples:
<html lang="fr"> (Parisian French/France)
<html lang="fr-FR"> (Parisian French/France)
<html lang="fr-CA"> (Canadian French)
<html lang="fr-BE"> (Belgian French)

Usage

Language information specified via the lang attribute may be used by a user agent to control rendering in a variety of ways. Some situations where author-supplied language information may be helpful include:

Assisting search engines
Assisting speech synthesizers
Helping a user agent select glyph variants for high quality typography
Helping a user agent choose a set of quotation marks
Helping a user agent make decisions about hyphenation, ligatures, and spacing
Assisting spell checkers and grammar checkers

Application

It is most commonly applied to the page as a whole via the html tag, for example:
<html lang="en">
It can also be applied to other tags such as:
```
<span>
<div>
<p>
<q>
<a>
```

It cannot be used on the following elements:

<applet>
<base>
<basefont>
<br>
<frame>
<frameset>
<iframe>
<param>
<script>

Examples

HTML 4.01

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="fr">
<head>
  <title>Un document multilingue</title>
</head>
<body>
  ...Interpreted as French...
  <p lang="es">...Interpreted as Spanish...</p>
  <p>...Interpreted as French again...</p>
  <p>...French text interrupted by<em lang="ja">some
  Japanese</em>French begins here again...</p>
</body>
</html>

XHTML 1.0

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<head>
  <title>document écrit en français</title>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body> 
  ...document écrit en français... 
</body>
</html>

XHTML 1.1

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr">
<head>
  <title>document écrit en français</title>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body> 
  ...document écrit en français...
</body>
</html>

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