Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Language Values

The value of the lang and xml:lang attributes is a language tag as defined in “Tags for the Identification of Languages” (RFC 3066 ). Language tags consist of a primary subtag that identifies the language according to a two-or three-letter language code (according to the ISO 639 standard ), for example, fr for French or no for Norwegian. When a language has both a two-and three-letter code, the two-letter code should be used.

The complete list of ISO 639 language codes is available at the Library of Congress web site at www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html. The more common two-letter codes are provided in Table 6-2 at the end of this section.

A language tag may also contain an optional subtag that further qualifies the language by country, dialect, or script, as shown in these examples.

en-GB

English as spoken in Great Britain

en-scouse

English with a scouse (Liverpool) dialect

bs-Cyrl

Bosnian with Cyrillic script (rather than Latin script, bs-Latn)

Codes for country names are provided by the standard ISO 3166 and are available at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html. Dialect and script language tags are registered with the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and are available at http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags.

Table 6-2. Two-letter codes of language names

Language	Code	Language	Code	Language	Code
Afar	aa	Armenian	hy	Oriya	or
Abkhazian	ab	Herero	hz