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Language codes

Language codes are widely used in HTML attributes, describing the language of the content they are referring to. There are many examples of its usage as most elements in HTML support language attributes. The following example document uses the language attributes, "lang" and "xml:lang" (the last for XHTML compatibility) in many elements.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<link rel="alternate" href="es/index.html" xml:lang="es" lang="es" />
<link rel="alternate" href="fr/index.html" xml:lang="fr" lang="fr" />
<title>Languages example document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This website uncovers to the secret history behind "<span xml:lang="es" lang="es">El dorado</span>"</p>
</body>
</html>

Sometimes language codes are also associated to a specific region in the form "[LanguageCode]-[CountryCode]" (e.g., en-US for United States English). In fact, there are many other subspecifications (for their complexity and poor use, not treated in this site) that include extended language, script, variant, extension and private use.

A reference table for country codes can be found in our country codes page.

Language codes table

LanguageCode
Abkhazian ab
Afar aa
Afrikaans af
Akan ak
Albanian sq
Amharic am
Arabic ar
Aragonese an
Armenian hy
Assamese as
Avaric av
Avestan ae
Aymara ay
Azerbaijani az
Bambara bm
Bashkir ba
Basque eu
Belarusian be
Bengali bn
Bihari bh
Bislama bi
Bosnian bs
Breton br
Bulgarian bg
Burmese my
Catalan; Valencian ca
Chamorro ch
Chechen ce
Chichewa; Chewa; Nyanja ny
Chinese zh
Church Slavic; Old Slavonic; Church Slavonic; Old Bulgarian; Old Church Slavonic cu
Chuvash cv
Cornish kw
Corsican co
Cree cr
Croatian hr
Czech cs
Danish da
Divehi dv
Dutch; Flemish nl
Dzongkha dz
English en
Esperanto eo
Estonian et
Ewe ee
Faroese fo
Fijian fj
Finnish fi
French fr
Fulah ff
Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic gd
Galician gl
Ganda lg
Georgian ka
German de
Greek, Modern (1453-) el
Guarani gn
Gujarati gu
Haitian; Haitian Creole ht
Hausa ha
Hebrew he
Herero hz
Hindi hi
Hiri Motu ho
Hungarian hu
Icelandic is
Ido io
Igbo ig
Indonesian id
Interlingua (IALA) ia
Interlingue ie
Inuktitut iu
Inupiaq ik
Irish ga
Italian it
Japanese ja
Javanese jv
Kalaallisut; Greenlandic kl
Kannada kn
Kanuri kr
Kashmiri ks
Kazakh kk
Khmer km
Kikuyu; Gikuyu ki
Kinyarwanda rw
Kirghiz ky
Komi kv
Kongo kg
Korean ko
Kuanyama; Kwanyama kj
Kurdish ku
Lao lo
Latin la
Latvian lv
Limburgan; Limburger; Limburgish li
Lingala ln
Lithuanian lt
Luba-Katanga lu
Luxembourgish; Letzeburgesch lb
Macedonian mk
Malagasy mg
Malay ms
Malayalam ml
Maltese mt
Manx gv
Maori mi
Marathi mr
Marshallese mh
Moldavian mo
Mongolian mn
Nauru na
Navajo; Navaho nv
Ndebele, North; North Ndebele nd
Ndebele, South; South Ndebele nr
Ndonga ng
Nepali ne
Northern Sami se
Norwegian no
Norwegian Bokmål; Bokmål, Norwegian nb
Norwegian Nynorsk; Nynorsk, Norwegian nn
Occitan (post 1500); Provençal oc
Ojibwa oj
Oriya or
Oromo om
Ossetian; Ossetic os
Pali pi
Panjabi; Punjabi pa
Persian fa
Polish pl
Portuguese pt
Pushto ps
Quechua qu
Raeto-Romance rm
Romanian ro
Rundi rn
Russian ru
Samoan sm
Sango sg
Sanskrit sa
Sardinian sc
Serbian sr
Shona sn
Sichuan Yi ii
Sindhi sd
Sinhala; Sinhalese si
Slovak sk
Slovenian sl
Somali so
Sotho, Southern st
Spanish; Castilian es
Sundanese su
Swahili sw
Swati ss
Swedish sv
Tagalog tl
Tahitian ty
Tajik tg
Tamil ta
Tatar tt
Telugu te
Thai th
Tibetan bo
Tigrinya ti
Tonga (Tonga Islands) to
Tsonga ts
Tswana tn
Turkish tr
Turkmen tk
Twi tw
Uighur; Uyghur ug
Ukrainian uk
Urdu ur
Uzbek uz
Venda ve
Vietnamese vi
Volapük vo
Walloon wa
Welsh cy
Western Frisian fy
Wolof wo
Xhosa xh
Yiddish yi
Yoruba yo
Zhuang; Chuang za
Zulu zu

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