Lang

Template documentation

This template should not be used in citation templates such as Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2, because it includes markup that will pollute the COinS metadata they produce; see COinS in Wiki मैथिली. The features of this template will be added to the citation templates in the next update.

The purpose of this template is to indicate, via a code, 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. The § Rationale, below, provides more information.

Syntax and usage

{{lang |ISO 639 language code |text}}

The ISO 639 code is usually a two- or three-letter abbreviation, in lowercase, of the language's name. French, for example, has the code "fr":

She said: "''{{lang|fr|Je suis française.}}''"

produces:

She said: "Je suis française."

By default, this template will place articles into the relevant subcategory of Category:Articles containing non-English-language text. To suppress this – e.g. when using {{lang}} within a wikilink or the title parameter of a citation – add the parameter |nocat=true. If {{lang}} is used to identify a language read from right to left, e.g. Arabic, the template {{rtl-lang}} may be used afterward to ensure the standard (English) left-to-right formatting is resumed. It also supports the |nocat= parameter.

It is better to incorporate only the foreign-language text (linked if appropriate) inside the template, so that extraneous markup that is not from the non-English language in question does not receive incorrect metadata for that language. For example:

• Use ''{{lang|it|[[goriziana]]}}''
• Not {{lang|it|''[[goriziana]]''}}

This includes italicization as foreign; English-language quotation marks around titles of work in language that use other quotation character glyphs; italicization of titles in languages that do not use that convention; and emphasis that is not found (in one style or another) in the original non-English text; among other cases. If in doubt, put such markup outside the {{lang}}.

There are also versions of this template for specific languages, intended for use the first time one of those languages appears in an article, that print the language's name and, for languages using the Latin alphabet, italicize the content automatically. For example, {{lang-es|español}} and {{lang-ru|русский язык}} yield, respectively, "स्पेनी: español" and "रूसी: русский язык" (without the quotation marks).

Language subtags can be used to indicate a regional variant of and/or a particular script used for a language. According to the World Wide Web Consortium, "the golden rule when creating language tags is to keep the tag as short as possible", so such subtags should only be added if there is good reason to use them. ISO 639‑1 is preferred over ISO 639‑2 and ISO 639‑3.

Italics

By default, {{lang|[language code]|...}} outputs plain text, while {{lang-[language code]|...}} templates (e.g. {{lang-de}}) output text in italics, except for languages that do not use a Latin-based script. If, with the latter, plain text is required (e.g. for proper names), {{noitalic}} may be used. For example,

... the border town of Ventimiglia ({{lang-fr|{{noitalic|Vintimille}}}})

produces:

... the border town of Ventimiglia (फ्रान्सेली: Vintimille)

Indicating writing script

If necessary, add the ISO 15924 code to indicate the script.

For example, Russian is usually written in the Cyrillic script, therefore the Cyrl script code is superfluous and the language code will be ru instead of ru-Cyrl. However, when that text is transliterated the transl code (transliteration) should be used because it isn't the default script for Russian: ru-Latn. Example:

* Moscow ([[Russian language|Russian]]: {{lang|ru|Москва́}}, ''{{transl|ru|Moskva}}'') 

which is the same as

* Moscow ({{lang-ru|Москва́}}, ''{{transl|ru|Moskva}}'') 

Results in your browser:

• Moscow (रूसी: Москва́, Moskva)

Instead of using ''{{transl|ru|Moskva}}'' the ''{{lang|ru-Latn|Moskva}}'' can be used, but if you specified a font and a size for the target language in your custom CSS (see Help:User style), the transliteration will appear in that specified style. To specify a transliteration scheme, for example, you are using the ISO 9 transliteration of Cyrillic, use ''{{transl|ru|ISO|Moskva}}'':

• Moscow (रूसी: Москва́; ISO 9: Moskva)

The IANA maintains a list specifying when the script tag should be suppressed [१]. In some cases, the script must be always specified, like Tajik which can be equally written in Arabic, Latin or Cyrillic alphabets:

* Tajik ({{rtl-lang|tg-Arab|تاجیکی}}, ''{{transl|tg|tojikī}}'', {{lang|tg-Cyrl|тоҷикӣ}}) 

Which results in your browser:

• Tajik (आकृति:Rtl-lang, tojikī, тоҷикӣ)

Note the use of {{rtl-lang}} instead of {{lang}} when using the Arabic script (see § Writing direction).

Undetermined language

The {{lang}} template is not only used to specify the language of foreign words, but also to specify a single symbol or character in a specific script, for example when discussing about a specific writing system. Many times the character / symbol is used in several languages, but when the article refers to the grapheme itself the ISO 639‑2 and ISO 639‑3 language code und for Undetermined language should be used. For example:

The {{lang|und-Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes. 

The 字 Han character has 6 strokes.

Han characters are used in Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese, and in this case the character is not used for any specific language. Note that the script code used is Hani, which specifies generic Han characters (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja).

Compare {{script}}

The {{script|Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes. 

The आकृति:Script Han character has 6 strokes.

Indicating regional variant

In some cases, maybe it will be needed to add ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes (specific usage of that country). Of course the three codes can appear in the same tag, for example the code zh-Hant-TW will be used for Chinese text written with Traditional Han characters, containing words or expressions specific to Taiwan. zh-Hans is for simplified. Examples:

* {{lang|zh-Hant-TW|臺灣}} 

Results in your browser:

• 臺灣

Writing direction

{{rtl-lang}} is used to wrap strings of right-to-left text (from languages like Arabic or Hebrew) embedded in left-to-right text, and resets text direction to left-to-right at its conclusion. For whole paragraphs of right-to-left text, use {{rtl-para}}. The rtl- prefix is not needed in the {{lang-xx}} form, as this is implied by the language: there is no {{rtl-lang-ar}}, for instance: just use {{lang-ar}}.

Rationale

• 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 Han unification § Examples of language dependent characters and these comparison table and screen photo.
• 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 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 re-use.
• Useful for application developers who re-publish Wikipedia (also see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Other languages).
• Useful for research or compiling statistics about language use in Wiki मैथिली.

Applying styles

You can apply CSS styles in your user style sheet. Registered users can put styles into User:XXX/monobook.css, where XXX is the user name.

These examples may work in Internet Explorer 8; prior versions do not support attribute selectors. Alternatively, try another browser such as Firefox.

Example: to apply a font to Russian-language text:

 span[lang|=ru] { font-family: fonteskaya; } 

Example: to apply a colour to text marked with any language:

 span[lang] { color: green; } 

Do not use quotation marks in your user style sheet; wikitext would screw them up. They are recommended in CSS, but not required other than for font families containing generic-family keywords ('inherit', 'serif', 'sans-serif', 'monospace', 'fantasy', and 'cursive'). See here for details.

TemplateData

See also

• {{Language}}
• Category:Multilingual support templates
• List of ISO 639 codes (language codes)
  • {{ISO 639 name}}
• List of ISO 15924 codes (script codes)
• List of ISO transliterations (transliteration codes)
• {{Cleanup-lang}} (for articles which should use this template, but do not yet)
• {{transl}} (for romanisation of languages not natively written in the Latin alphabet
• {{Unicode}}, {{script}} (for specific characters)
• Category:Language icon templates (for visually marking external links to foreign-language content)

Further information

• W3C
  • Language tags in HTML and XML – Overview
  • Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content – W3C Working Draft 21 July 2006
  • Understanding the New Language Tags
  • FAQ: Styling using the lang attribute
• IANA
  • IANA Language Subtag Registry
  • Tags for Identifying Languages (RFC 4646)
  • Matching of Language Tags (RFC 4647)
  • Language tags (obsolete per RFC 4646)
• Mozilla Firefox
  • Bug with script selection

References