HTML ISO Language Code (ISO 639-1)

February 10, 2021 7:26 pm IST

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What is ISO Language Code?

International Organization for Standardization(ISO) has published a Standard way for defining languages with Codes in abbreviations.

According to W3C, it is mandatory to declare the primary language for each web page inside <html> tag using lang attribute.

According to Google, the declared primary language code must be in ISO 639-1 format.

Where to Specify?

The ISO Language codes should be specified in the current page and the external page linked to the current page using <link>.

How to Specify?

There are 2 attributes that helps you to specify the Language Code of a page. They are

lang - To specify the Language Code of the current page.
hreflang - To specify the Language Code of the external page linked to the current page using <link>.

Example

HTML Online Editor

<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <body> <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ca" hreflang="en-ca"> <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="en"> </body> </html>

Note: In the above example, en refers to the language code. Whereas CA and AU refer to the Country Code.

It is to be noted that when you have specific url's for English speakers in Australia(en-au), Canada(en-ca) etc. then the Language code should be followed by the Country code.

ISO Country Code (ISO 639-1)

The following table comprise of ISO Country Code (ISO 639-1)

Language	ISO Code
Abkhazian	ab
Afar	aa
Afrikaans	af
Akan	ak
Albanian	sq
Amharic	am
Arabic	ar
Aragonese	an
Armenian	hy
Assamese	as
Avaric	av
Avestan	ae
Aymara	ay
Azerbaijani	az
Bambara	bm
Bashkir	ba
Basque	eu
Belarusian	be
Bengali (Bangla)	bn
Bihari	bh
Bislama	bi
Bosnian	bs
Breton	br
Bulgarian	bg
Burmese	my
Catalan	ca
Chamorro	ch
Chechen	ce
Chichewa, Chewa, Nyanja	ny
Chinese	zh
Chinese (Simplified)	zh-Hans
Chinese (Traditional)	zh-Hant
Chuvash	cv
Cornish	kw
Corsican	co
Cree	cr
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Divehi, Dhivehi, Maldivian	dv
Dutch	nl
Dzongkha	dz
English	en
Esperanto	eo
Estonian	et
Ewe	ee
Faroese	fo
Fijian	fj
Finnish	fi
French	fr
Fula, Fulah, Pulaar, Pular	ff
Galician	gl
Gaelic (Scottish)	gd
Gaelic (Manx)	gv
Georgian	ka
German	de
Greek	el
Greenlandic	kl
Guarani	gn
Gujarati	gu
Haitian Creole	ht
Hausa	ha
Hebrew	he
Herero	hz
Hindi	hi
Hiri Motu	ho
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Ido	io
Igbo	ig
Indonesian	id, in
Interlingua	ia
Interlingue	ie
Inuktitut	iu
Inupiak	ik
Irish	ga
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Javanese	jv
Kalaallisut, Greenlandic	kl
Kannada	kn
Kanuri	kr
Kashmiri	ks
Kazakh	kk
Khmer	km
Kikuyu	ki
Kinyarwanda (Rwanda)	rw
Kirundi	rn
Kyrgyz	ky
Komi	kv
Kongo	kg
Korean	ko
Kurdish	ku
Kwanyama	kj
Lao	lo
Latin	la
Latvian (Lettish)	lv
Limburgish ( Limburger)	li
Lingala	ln
Lithuanian	lt
Luga-Katanga	lu
Luganda, Ganda	lg
Luxembourgish	lb
Manx	gv
Macedonian	mk
Malagasy	mg
Malay	ms
Malayalam	ml
Maltese	mt
Maori	mi
Marathi	mr
Marshallese	mh
Moldavian	mo
Mongolian	mn
Nauru	na
Navajo	nv
Ndonga	ng
Northern Ndebele	nd
Nepali	ne
Norwegian	no
Norwegian bokmål	nb
Norwegian nynorsk	nn
Nuosu	ii
Occitan	oc
Ojibwe	oj
Old Church Slavonic, Old Bulgarian	cu
Oriya	or
Oromo (Afaan Oromo)	om
Ossetian	os
Pāli	pi
Pashto, Pushto	ps
Persian (Farsi)	fa
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Punjabi (Eastern)	pa
Quechua	qu
Romansh	rm
Romanian	ro
Russian	ru
Sami	se
Samoan	sm
Sango	sg
Sanskrit	sa
Serbian	sr
Serbo-Croatian	sh
Sesotho	st
Setswana	tn
Shona	sn
Sichuan Yi	ii
Sindhi	sd
Sinhalese	si
Siswati	ss
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Somali	so
Southern Ndebele	nr
Spanish	es
Sundanese	su
Swahili (Kiswahili)	sw
Swati	ss
Swedish	sv
Tagalog	tl
Tahitian	ty
Tajik	tg
Tamil	ta
Tatar	tt
Telugu	te
Thai	th
Tibetan	bo
Tigrinya	ti
Tonga	to
Tsonga	ts
Turkish	tr
Turkmen	tk
Twi	tw
Uyghur	ug
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Uzbek	uz
Venda	ve
Vietnamese	vi
Volapük	vo
Wallon	wa
Welsh	cy
Wolof	wo
Western Frisian	fy
Xhosa	xh
Yiddish	yi, ji
Yoruba	yo
Zhuang, Chuang	za
Zulu	zu