META Language Tag - Metadata Elements

Abstract

In HTML elements, the language attribute specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

The value of the Content attribute of the META element is the same as the value of the Content-Language header in HTTP; i.e, a comma-separated list of language codes. For example:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en,fr">

Code for the representation of names of languages

In the primary language tag:

All 2-letter tags are interpreted according to ISO standard 639, "Code for the representation of names of languages" [ISO 639].

Here is a listing of the ISO 639 2 letter language codes...

AA "Afar"
AB "Abkhazian"
AF "Afrikaans"
AM "Amharic"
AR "Arabic"
AS "Assamese"
AY "Aymara"
AZ "Azerbaijani"
BA "Bashkir"
BE "Byelorussian"
BG "Bulgarian"
BH "Bihari"
BI "Bislama"
BN "Bengali" "Bangla"
BO "Tibetan"
BR "Breton"
CA "Catalan"
CO "Corsican"
CS "Czech"
CY "Welsh"
DA "Danish"
DE "German"
DZ "Bhutani"
EL "Greek"
EN "English" "American"
EO "Esperanto"
ES "Spanish"
ET "Estonian"
EU "Basque"
FA "Persian"
FI "Finnish"
FJ "Fiji"
FO "Faeroese"
FR "French"
FY "Frisian"
GA "Irish"
GD "Gaelic" "Scots Gaelic"
GL "Galician"
GN "Guarani"
GU "Gujarati"
HA "Hausa"
HI "Hindi"
HR "Croatian"
HU "Hungarian"
HY "Armenian"
IA "Interlingua"

IE "Interlingue"
IK "Inupiak"
IN "Indonesian"
IS "Icelandic"
IT "Italian"
IW "Hebrew"
JA "Japanese"
JI "Yiddish"
JW "Javanese"
KA "Georgian"
KK "Kazakh"
KL "Greenlandic"
KM "Cambodian"
KN "Kannada"
KO "Korean"
KS "Kashmiri"
KU "Kurdish"
KY "Kirghiz"
LA "Latin"
LN "Lingala"
LO "Laothian"
LT "Lithuanian"
LV "Latvian" "Lettish"
MG "Malagasy"
MI "Maori"
MK "Macedonian"
ML "Malayalam"
MN "Mongolian"
MO "Moldavian"
MR "Marathi"
MS "Malay"
MT "Maltese"
MY "Burmese"
NA "Nauru"
NE "Nepali"
NL "Dutch"
NO "Norwegian"
OC "Occitan"
OM "Oromo" "Afan"
OR "Oriya"
PA "Punjabi"
PL "Polish"
PS "Pashto" "Pushto"
PT "Portuguese"
QU "Quechua"

RM "Rhaeto-Romance"
RN "Kirundi"
RO "Romanian"
RU "Russian"
RW "Kinyarwanda"
SA "Sanskrit"
SD "Sindhi"
SG "Sangro"
SH "Serbo-Croatian"
SI "Singhalese"
SK "Slovak"
SL "Slovenian"
SM "Samoan"
SN "Shona"
SO "Somali"
SQ "Albanian"
SR "Serbian"
SS "Siswati"
ST "Sesotho"
SU "Sudanese"
SV "Swedish"
SW "Swahili"
TA "Tamil"
TE "Tegulu"
TG "Tajik"
TH "Thai"
TI "Tigrinya"
TK "Turkmen"
TL "Tagalog"
TN "Setswana"
TO "Tonga"
TR "Turkish"
TS "Tsonga"
TT "Tatar"
TW "Twi"
UK "Ukrainian"
UR "Urdu"
UZ "Uzbek"
VI "Vietnamese"
VO "Volapuk"
WO "Wolof"
XH "Xhosa"
YO "Yoruba"
ZH "Chinese"
ZU "Zulu"

Further information on the Language META Tag and ISO 639 2 letter and 3 letter language codes can be found at the W3C - www.w3.org - ISO 639 Language Codes.