Language codes tell browsers, search engines, and assistive technologies which human language your content uses. In HTML you declare them with the lang attribute—most often on the <html> element using ISO 639-1 two-letter codes like en or fr.
Two letters.
On html.
en-US tags.
Nested lang.
Screen readers.
191 codes.
HTML language codes are used to specify the language of the content within an HTML document.
These codes are defined by the ISO 639-1 standard, which assigns two-letter codes to represent different languages.
Here are some examples of commonly used HTML language codes:
| Language | ISO Code |
|---|---|
| English | en |
| French | fr |
| Spanish | es |
| German | de |
| Hindi | hi |
| Japanese | ja |
| Chinese (Simplified) | zh-Hans |
| Arabic | ar |
Language codes identify languages (en). Country codes identify nations (US). Combine them for regional variants: lang="en-US". See Country Code for ISO country lists.
Complete reference table (191 entries). Some rows list legacy or alternate codes separated by commas—prefer the first code for new projects.
| 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 |
To specify the language of an HTML document, you can use the lang attribute on the <html> tag. Here’s an example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>HTML Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Content of the HTML document -->
</body>
</html>In this example, the lang attribute is set to en, indicating that the content of the HTML document is in English.
This information can be used by browsers, search engines, and assistive technologies to provide language-specific features and optimizations.
By setting the appropriate language code for your HTML documents, you can improve accessibility, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and user experience for users who speak different languages.
| Task | Markup |
|---|---|
| English page | <html lang="en"> |
| US English | <html lang="en-US"> |
| French paragraph | <p lang="fr">...</p> |
| Read in JS | document.documentElement.lang |
Three short examples from a single lang attribute to a full page with mixed languages. Try It Yourself opens plain HTML demos with no CSS.
Set lang="en" on <html> so the whole page is declared as English:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>English page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello</h1>
<p>This document is in English.</p>
</body>
</html>Browsers and screen readers read document.documentElement.lang from this attribute.
Override lang on individual elements when one page contains multiple languages:
<html lang="en">
<body>
<p>This paragraph is English (document default).</p>
<p lang="fr">Ce paragraphe est en français.</p>
<p lang="es">Este párrafo está en español.</p>
<p lang="hi">यह अनुच्छेद हिंदी में है।</p>
</body>
</html>Nested lang overrides the document default only for that subtree—essential for accessibility on multilingual sites.
Use a language plus region code for locale-specific content such as US English:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>HTML Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Content of the HTML document -->
</body>
</html>en-US follows BCP 47: lowercase language (en) + uppercase region (US). Pair with country codes when you need both.
en-GB.lang.HTML language codes power accessibility, SEO, and localization through the simple lang attribute. Start with ISO 639-1 two-letter codes, use the full table above as your reference, and declare language on every page you publish.
Next: learn how servers communicate status with HTTP Status Codes, or dive deeper into the HTML lang attribute.
The xml:lang attribute serves a similar purpose in XHTML documents. In modern HTML5, lang alone is sufficient and is the attribute you should use.
Change lang="en" to another code and see how the document language updates.
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