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 for more information.

Syntax and usage
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 :


 * → 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  code, use the ISO 639-1 code   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. To suppress this – e.g. when using within a wikilink or the title parameter of a citation – add the parameter no.

Automatic italics
automatically applies italic styling when the text in  is written entirely in the   script (the Latin alphabet and its extensions), either when that is the default encoding for the language or when it is triggered by a   language code:
 * → Je suis française.
 * → Je suis française. – external markup is ignored
 * → la'az (לעז)
 * → la'az (לעז) – external markup is ignored around the  text, but will incorrectly italicize the Hebrew-character material.

When  script should not be italicized, there are multiple approaches: no – renders  in upright font; italic markup around the template is ignored; italic markup inside the template causes an error message:
 * → Je suis française.
 * → Je suis française.
 * → Je suis française. – italic markup in conflict with no

unset – disables template-provided styling;  is styled according to external or internal wiki markup:
 * → Je suis française.
 * → Je suis française.
 * → Je suis English.

can also be used:
 * → Je suis English.

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 (кремль, 'castle') is a major fortified central complex ...

While templates output text in italics for languages with Latin-based scripts, if plain text is required, such as for proper names, no or  may be used:


 * → the border town of Ventimiglia (Vintimille)
 * → the border town of Ventimiglia (Vintimille)
 * → the border town of Ventimiglia (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.

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, yes should be added to correctly communicate writing direction. To mark 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  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 templates, as this is implied by the template's language.

the function selector parameter
uses the Lua function  Module:Lang. That module also supports all of the templates using the Lua functions   and. 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:
 * – returns  if the provided IETF language tag is valid; nil else
 * – returns  if the provided language name is valid; nil else
 * – the function that renders ; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
 * – the function that renders template where the text is not italicized; can be used when a  template, for example, does not exist for a particular language:
 * – the function that renders template where the text is italicized; can be used when a  template, for example, does not exist for a particular language:
 * – returns the language name associated with the provided IETF language tag:
 * – returns the ISO 639 language code (sometimes IETF language tag) associated with the provided language name:
 * – the function that renders ; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
 * → DIN
 * – the function that renders template where the text is italicized; can be used when a  template, for example, does not exist for a particular language:
 * – returns the language name associated with the provided IETF language tag:
 * – returns the ISO 639 language code (sometimes IETF language tag) associated with the provided language name:
 * – the function that renders ; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
 * → DIN
 * – the function that renders ; listed here for completeness, this particular usage is more-or-less pointless
 * → DIN
 * → DIN

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 is a language which can be found written in Arabic, Latin , and Cyrillic  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 (تاجیکی, toçikī, 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, just as   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. 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. 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 :


 * → Moscow (Москва, )

To specify a transliteration scheme, such as the ISO transliteration standard for Cyrillic, use.

Undetermined language
The 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, for "Undetermined language", should be used:


 * The Chinese character 字 has 6 strokes.
 * The Chinese character 字 has 6 strokes.

Chinese characters (a.k.a. Han characters) have been used used to write Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and numerous other languages. In this case the character does not represent a use specific to any language in particular. Note that the script code used is, which specifies Chinese characters generally, as opposed to   and   for traditional or simplified characters respectively.

Compare the use of script:


 * The Chinese character has 6 strokes.
 * The Chinese character has 6 strokes.

Languages with no code
The code, for "Miscellaneous", to indicate 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 as used in Brazil  could be represented as , and Spanish as used in Latin America as.

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


 * Taiwan (臺灣, )
 * Taiwan (臺灣, )

Private-use language tags
This template supports various private-use IETF language tags. Private-use tags contain the  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.

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 of whether it is an internal or external link, or a link provided through an ill interwiki link template:

Works:
 * → Book of hours
 * → Stundenbuch
 * → Machsor Lipsiae

Does not work:
 * → Book of hours (never works)
 * → Stundenbuch (does not work in article space, works on talk and some other types of pages)
 * → Machsor Lipsiae (does not work in article space, works on talk and some other types of pages)

Rationale
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 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 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 reuse.
 * Useful for application developers who re-publish Wikipedia (also see ).
 * 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:

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

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

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:

then the following wikitext will look like the image below:

Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich

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۔

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

TemplateData
{	"description": "Indicate that a given span of text belongs to a particular language. Allows browsers to correctly present and pronounce foreign languages.", "params": { "1": {			"label": "Language tag", "description": "A language tag, or an ISO 639 language code.", "type": "string", "required": true, "example": "fr", "aliases": [ "code" ]		},		"2": {			"label": "Text", "description": "The text belonging to the language specified.", "type": "string", "required": true, "example": "Je suis française.", "aliases": [ "text" ]		},		"rtl": { "label": "Right to left", "description": "Indicates that the language should be displayed from right to left.", "example": "yes", "type": "string", "default": "no" },		"italic": { "aliases": [ "italics", "i" ],			"label": "Italicize", "description": "Italicizes the text", "default": "yes", "example": "no", "type": "boolean" },		"size": { "label": "Font-size", "description": "sets font-size", "example": "120%, 1.2em" },		"cat": {}, "nocat": {} },	"format": "inline" }