Template:Lang/doc
| This is a documentation subpage for Template:Lang. It contains usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page. |
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" section below provides more information.
Contents
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":
- Template:Plaincode 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 Template:Plaincode 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 Template:Plaincode, which specifies generic Han characters (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja).
Compare {{script}}
The {{script|Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes.
- The Template: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 Template:Plaincode will be used for Chinese text written with Traditional Han characters, containing words or expressions specific to Taiwan. Template:Plaincode 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 choosing appropriate quotation marks, and making 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 Wikipedia.
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 http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-family-prop for details.
TemplateData
TemplateData for Lang
Indicate that a given span of text belongs to a particular language. Use by browsers which use different styles for different languages.
| Parameter | Description | Type | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language code | 1 | A language tag or an ISO 639 language code, e.g. fr (the code for French). | String | required |
| Text | 2 | The text e.g. Je suis française. | String | required |
See also
- Category:Multilingual support templates
- List of ISO 639 codes (language codes)
- 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
- {{Language}}
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
References