MetaTag
ISO Language Codes
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
The lang attribute is used to define the base language to be used for displaying text and characters on a Web site. This allows an internationalization of HTML for a very large number of languages. If the metatag generator does not have the one you want, feel free to use one of these by typing it into the code.
The languages are designated by a two letter code, such as "en" for English or "es" for Spanish. One or more hyphenated values can be tacked on to the initial two letter code to specify regional or ethnic variations, such as "en-us" for U.S. English. You can get a list of Country Codes here
Abkhazian ------------------------------------------AB
Afar ------------------------------------------AA
Afrikaans ------------------------------------------AF
Albanian ------------------------------------------SQ
Amharic ------------------------------------------AM
Arabic ------------------------------------------AR
Armenian ------------------------------------------HY
Assamese ------------------------------------------AS
Aymara ------------------------------------------AY
Azerbaijani ------------------------------------------AZ
Bashkir ------------------------------------------BA
Basque ------------------------------------------EU
Bengali, Bangla ------------------------------------------BN
Bhutani ------------------------------------------DZ
Bihari ------------------------------------------BH
<Bislama ------------------------------------------BI
Breton ------------------------------------------BR
Bulgarian ------------------------------------------BG
Burmese ------------------------------------------MY
Byelorussian ------------------------------------------BE
Cambodian ------------------------------------------KM
Catalan ------------------------------------------CA
Chinese ------------------------------------------ZH
Corsican ------------------------------------------CO
Croatian ------------------------------------------HR
Czech ------------------------------------------CS
Danish ------------------------------------------DA
Dutch ------------------------------------------NL
English, American ------------------------------------------EN
Esperanto ------------------------------------------EO
Estonian ------------------------------------------ET
Faeroese ------------------------------------------FO
Fiji ------------------------------------------FJ
Finnish ------------------------------------------FI
French ------------------------------------------FR
Frisian ------------------------------------------FY
Gaelic ------------------------------------------GD
Galician ------------------------------------------GL
Georgian ------------------------------------------KA
German ------------------------------------------DE
Greek ------------------------------------------EL
Greenlandic ------------------------------------------KL
Guarani ------------------------------------------GN
Gujarati ------------------------------------------GU
Hausa ------------------------------------------HA
Hebrew ------------------------------------------IW
Hindi ------------------------------------------HI
Hungarian ------------------------------------------HU
Icelandic ------------------------------------------IS
Indonesian ------------------------------------------IN
Interlingua ------------------------------------------IA
Interlingue ------------------------------------------IE
Inupiak ------------------------------------------IK
Irish ------------------------------------------GA
Italian ------------------------------------------IT
Japanese ------------------------------------------JA
Javanese ------------------------------------------JW
Kannada ------------------------------------------KN
Kashmiri ------------------------------------------KS
Kazakh ------------------------------------------KK
Kinyarwanda ------------------------------------------RW
Kirghiz ------------------------------------------KY
Kirundi ------------------------------------------RN
Korean ------------------------------------------KO
Kurdish ------------------------------------------KU
Laothian ------------------------------------------LO
Latin ------------------------------------------LA
Latvian, Lettish ------------------------------------------LV
Lingala ------------------------------------------LN
Lithuanian ------------------------------------------LT
Macedonian ------------------------------------------MK
Malagasy ------------------------------------------MG
Malay ------------------------------------------MS
Malayalam ------------------------------------------ML
Maltese ------------------------------------------MT
Maori ------------------------------------------MI
Marathi ------------------------------------------MR
Moldavian ------------------------------------------MO
Mongolian ------------------------------------------MN
Nauru ------------------------------------------NA
Nepali ------------------------------------------NE
Norwegian ------------------------------------------NO
Occitan ------------------------------------------OC
Oriya ------------------------------------------OR
Oromo, Afan ------------------------------------------OM
Pashto, Pushto ------------------------------------------PS
Persian ------------------------------------------FA
Polish ------------------------------------------PL
Portuguese ------------------------------------------PT
Punjabi ------------------------------------------PA
Quechua ------------------------------------------QU
Rhaeto-Romance ------------------------------------------RM
Romanian ------------------------------------------RO
Russian ------------------------------------------RU
Samoan ------------------------------------------SM
Sangro ------------------------------------------SG
Sanskrit ------------------------------------------SA
Serbian ------------------------------------------SR
Serbo-Croatian ------------------------------------------SH
Sesotho ------------------------------------------ST
Setswana ------------------------------------------TN
Shona ------------------------------------------SN
Sindhi ------------------------------------------SD
Singhalese ------------------------------------------SI
Siswati ------------------------------------------SS
Slovak ------------------------------------------SK
Slovenian ------------------------------------------SL
Somali ------------------------------------------SO
Spanish ------------------------------------------ES
Sudanese ------------------------------------------SU
Swahili ------------------------------------------SW
Swedish ------------------------------------------SV
Tagalog ------------------------------------------TL
Tajik ------------------------------------------TG
Tamil ------------------------------------------TA
Tatar ------------------------------------------TT
Tegulu ------------------------------------------TE
Thai ------------------------------------------TH
Tibetan ------------------------------------------BO
Tigrinya ------------------------------------------TI
Tonga ------------------------------------------TO
Tsonga ------------------------------------------TS
Turkish ------------------------------------------TR
Turkmen ------------------------------------------TK
Twi ------------------------------------------TW
Ukrainian ------------------------------------------UK
Urdu ------------------------------------------UR
Uzbek ------------------------------------------UZ
Vietnamese ------------------------------------------VI
Volapuk ------------------------------------------VO
Welsh ------------------------------------------CY
Wolof ------------------------------------------WO
Xhosa ------------------------------------------XH
Yiddish ------------------------------------------JI
Yoruba ------------------------------------------YO
Zulu ------------------------------------------ZU
Note that html texts that contain foreign languages that use special characters will have to be saved as a Unicode file, rather than as an ANSI file, in order for the characters to be properly displayed. Please be aware that some browsers may not be capable of correctly displaying a Unicode file.
HTML tags are always considered English. Therefore, the DocType declaration at the top of web pages will always say EN, even though the rest of the page is in a different language:
A document can declare more than one language or language group for a visitor, but only one for a user-agent (browser).
This means that the meta http-equiv="Content-Language" tag can only reference one language - i.e. "en"
The Lang= or xml:lang= tags can reference several languages - i.e. "en, zh, pt, fr" or even local variants: "en-us" (US English).
One method of having more than one language on a page is by using the DIV or SPAN language attributes:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="en">
<DIV Lang="en">
Let us drink a carbonated beverage and sit on this chesterfield, ok?
</DIV>
<DIV Lang="en-us">
Let's drink a soda on the sofa, hey?
</DIV>
<DIV Lang="en-ca">
Let's down a pop on the couch, eh?
<DIV Lang="fr">
Buvons une boisson carbonatée et reposons-nous sur ce Chesterfield.
</DIV>
This lets you tell the browser what to expect, but lets a search engine or screen reader how to deal with certain blocks of text.
