Can hreflang in XML sitemaps include country as well as language?

Question

We have a multicountry and multilanguage website. Different countries have multiple available languages. We have different version of each page for country and language.

From Google documentation I see that the suggested sitemap.xml approach is to use alternate links with language spec:

<xhtml:link
  rel="alternate"
  hreflang="de"
  href="https://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>

Is there a way to also include the intended country in those links? Is there any other suggested way of hinting google of a page specific country?

Answer 1

Yes, you can also include the country as well.

If you scroll down a bit on that page you linked you will see:

Supported language/region codes

The value of the hreflang attribute identifies the language (in ISO 639-1 format) and optionally a region (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) of an alternate URL. If there's only one code specified, Google assumes the code to be a language code. The language doesn't need to be related to the region. For example:

de: German language content, independent of region

en-GB: English language content, for GB users

de-ES: German language content, for users in Spain