Define multiple languages in html root element's lang attribute?

Asked 27/8, 2012 at 22:14 Answered 3/4, 2020 at 21:11

I want to determine more than one language for a document, because it's available in more than one language. If I use:

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

this is not W3C valid and the validator says I should define it in the root's lang attribute, but this attribute only supports one language:

<html lang="en">

works, but not

<html lang="de,en,fr">

So where should I define it?

Chickasaw answered 27/8, 2012 at 22:14 Comment(3)

If a document is available in more than one language, you basically have more than one document available. So each document should have its own language setting. – Isidoro 27/8, 2012 at 22:20

possible duplicate of What <html lang=""> attribute value should I use for a mixed language page? – Kilderkin 1/2, 2014 at 12:5

The other question (possible duplicate) also features two technically sound, but implication-wise for robots and assistive technology unconvincing answers: mul and empty value. – Terricolous 5/6, 2020 at 20:44

All attributes support only one language, so I believe you should define only one language; the most important language should be set. This can't be done if you have multiple languages on a single document, so here is the info to solve your problem:

The lang and xml:lang attributes do not allow you to assign multiple languages to a single document. So if you're writing a Web page with multiple languages you have two options:

Define a primary language with the lang attribute, and then call out the secondary language(s) with lang attributes on elements in the document

Define lang in the specific sections of the document as needed:

<div lang="fr-CA" xml:lang="fr-CA">
Canadian French content...
</div>
<div lang="en-CA" xml:lang="en-CA">
Canadian English content...
</div>
<div lang="nl-NL" xml:lang="nl-NL">
Netherlands, Dutch content...
</div>

I have some multiple-language pages and I do use the 2nd option.

You might want to read http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/NOTE-i18n-html-tech-lang-20070412/#ri20060630.133619987

Athlete answered 20/1, 2014 at 23:46 Comment(0)

You can't use it like this.

You'll have to either use an encoding that encompasses all desired chars (e.g UTF-8) which supports the entire Unicode range), or else use named entities or numeric references to include characters outside the encoding in use.

http://bytes.com/topic/html-css/answers/154652-multiple-languages-one-document

UPDATE

If using HTML5 then you can use lang for each element. That means if you have a div that contains Mandarin Chinese in it, just define an attribute lang="zh-CN" for that div, like . ( What is the HTML5 alternative to the obsolete meta http-equiv=content-language. )

Hygrostat answered 27/8, 2012 at 22:19 Comment(1)

The first part of the answer is irrelevant: the question was not about encodings or character representation. And the second part does not depend on HTML5. – Countershading 28/8, 2012 at 5:54

The meaning of the Content-Language HTTP header, and hence its meta tag surrogate, is that it declares the languages of the document, or the languages of the intended audience (the relevant RFCs are contradicting), not the languages of some other documents (like translations of the current document). The practical effect of header is small, probably limited to using the first language named as the language of the document, if there is no language information in HTML markup.

To indicate that a document is available in other languages, you can use tags like

 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="foobar.de.html">

See 12.3.3 Links and search engines in HTML 4.01 spec.

There is no guarantee that this will have any effect. It might affect search engines, but not more than a normal link would do. Some old browser versions had commands for selecting alternate versions of a document, based on elements like this, but the feature seems to have been dropped.

Countershading answered 28/8, 2012 at 6:4 Comment(2)

With document, you mean the HTML document or the website itself? I happen to write my code in English, like name's of div's and what not but the actual content is in another language. Is the correct way to use English or the other language? – Winer 28/1, 2019 at 12:54

The attributes discussed here specify the main language of the content of the HTML document (page). It primarily relates to the text content in elements, but in theory also to attributes of elements. However, this refers to attributes with essentially linguistic content, like title and alt attributes, not to attributes like name or id; their values are identifier-like. So you should just declare the language of the actual content. – Countershading 29/1, 2019 at 18:25

What HTML version do you use? In HTML 4.01, your use of Content-Language with multiple languages is valid. In HTML5, it's not.

But even for HTML 4.01, the use of Content-Language for the meta element is not recommended: HTTP headers, meta elements and language information (W3C)

Ezekiel answered 28/8, 2012 at 21:12 Comment(0)

As the other posters and the W3C have pointed out, you cannot specify more than one language in the lang attribute of the html tag.

However, as shown in this answer to "What attribute value should I use for a mixed language page?", you can markup different parts of a page with elements such as div and span tags to indicate different languages (or references to other languages) used on the page.

Also, you can create metadata that describes multiple languages for the intended audience of a page, rather than the language of a specific range of text. You do so by getting the server to send the information in the HTTP Content-Language header. If your intended audience speaks more than one language, the HTTP header allows you to use a comma-separated list of languages. The following is an example of an HTTP header that declares the resource to be a mixture of English, Hindi and Punjabi from the W3C's article Declaring language in HTML:

Content-Language: en, hi, pa

Note: you should always use a language attribute on the html tag. The language attribute always overrides the HTTP header information. The HTTP header should be used only to provide metadata about the intended audience of the document as a whole, and the language attribute on the html tag should be used to declare the default language of the content as in a multilingual audience.

For details on this last technique, see HTTP headers, meta elements and language information. For general language declarations and markup, see Declaring language in HTML.

Kylakylah answered 3/4, 2020 at 21:11 Comment(0)

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