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Based on other discussions on this site and elsewhere, using flags to identify languages is the path to madness.

Nevertheless, I need an easy way to identify the language of individual content items on my site. I was thinking a bracketed 3 letter prefix might do the trick:

[ENG] - English
[FRE] - French
[FRA] - French (better?)
[ITA] - Italian
[SPA] - Spanish
[ESP] - Spanish (better?)
[GER] - German
[JPN] - Japanese
[CHN-S] - Chinese Simplified
[CHN-T] - Chinese Traditional
etc...

Apart from the special case for Chinese's two distinct systems, would I run into any problems sticking to a 3 character prefix system?

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3
  • Where are you going to be using these codes? Just for your internal database, or in URLs?
    – Mark Henderson
    Dec 10, 2010 at 2:34
  • In a list of articles, they'd appear before the article title... [PFX] title title title
    – Drew
    Dec 10, 2010 at 2:45
  • IS 693-2T codes are preferable to 693-2B for most purposes, including this.
    – Peter Taylor
    Dec 6, 2011 at 13:35

3 Answers 3

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I don't think reinventing the wheel is the right path.

There are a lot of standards currently on use. I think if you wanna markup your elements correctly, start from the basis: there is a global HTML attribute named lang for this purpose.

<html lang='de-de'>
<html lang='en-us'>
...

for an element only

<html lang='pt-br'>
...
<p>Também chamado de <abbr lang='en-us' title='Search Engine Optimization'>SEO</abbr>...</p>
...

Follow some references for your convenience:

EDIT

I'm still not sure if you intend to use this in URL path, in title, or in a select lang widget.

However, I think keeping some existing convention is the safe path as most people should be used to them. Also, I think flags (countries flags) would be a good choice for a widget.

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  • Thank you for the detailed response. I suppose I should have been a bit clearer - the intended beneficiary of this feature would only be the site users. When they see new content, they'd like to know right away what language it's in (my non-Eng users often use English titles so that's not an instant tipoff). I'm not interested in SEO, so using HTML tags - while semantically correct - wouldn't solve the problem. Nevertheless, thank you for the links. I've learned a few new things!
    – Drew
    Dec 10, 2010 at 23:48
  • Oh, now I see what you mean... OK, let's go to some edit in my response. And it was cool to share some quality links ;)
    – Davis Peixoto
    Dec 11, 2010 at 21:21
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You are abbreviating language names in English, not in that language. German speakers will be looking for an abbreviation of "Deutsch", not "German". Why not use the standard two-letter abbreviations for languages?

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1

I see no problems with this for anyone using a modern browser. You might want to add some metadata/microdata to the text though, to help browsers and search engines interpret what your codes mean. I know I saw some questions on one of the stack exchange sites about it the other day, but I can't find them at the moment.

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