ISO 639 Language Codes Cheatsheet

Two-letter and three-letter language codes

Reference

Contents

Common Codes European Asian Other Languages Locale Format Usage in HTML

🌐

Common Language Codes

Code  Lang3  Language
en    eng    English
es    spa    Spanish
fr    fra    French
de    deu    German
it    ita    Italian
pt    por    Portuguese
ru    rus    Russian
zh    zho    Chinese
ja    jpn    Japanese
ko    kor    Korean
ar    ara    Arabic
hi    hin    Hindi

🇪🇺

European Languages

Code  Language       Code  Language
bg    Bulgarian      cs    Czech
da    Danish         nl    Dutch
el    Greek          et    Estonian
fi    Finnish        ga    Irish
hr    Croatian       hu    Hungarian
is    Icelandic      lt    Lithuanian
lv    Latvian        mk    Macedonian
mt    Maltese        no    Norwegian
pl    Polish         ro    Romanian
sk    Slovak         sl    Slovenian
sr    Serbian        sv    Swedish
uk    Ukrainian      cy    Welsh

🌏

Asian Languages

Code  Language       Code  Language
bn    Bengali        gu    Gujarati
he    Hebrew         id    Indonesian
kn    Kannada        lo    Lao
ml    Malayalam      mn    Mongolian
ms    Malay          my    Burmese
ne    Nepali         pa    Punjabi
si    Sinhala        ta    Tamil
te    Telugu         th    Thai
tl    Tagalog        tr    Turkish
ur    Urdu           vi    Vietnamese

🗺️

Other Languages

Code  Language       Code  Language
af    Afrikaans      am    Amharic
az    Azerbaijani    eu    Basque
ca    Catalan        eo    Esperanto
haw   Hawaiian       ig    Igbo
jv    Javanese       kk    Kazakh
km    Khmer          rw    Kinyarwanda
la    Latin          mg    Malagasy
so    Somali         su    Sundanese
sw    Swahili        uz    Uzbek
yo    Yoruba         zu    Zulu

🏷️

Locale Format

# Format: language_REGION  or  language-Region

en-US    English (US)
en-GB    English (UK)
en-AU    English (Australia)
fr-FR    French (France)
fr-CA    French (Canada)
pt-BR    Portuguese (Brazil)
pt-PT    Portuguese (Portugal)
zh-CN    Chinese (Simplified)
zh-TW    Chinese (Traditional)
es-MX    Spanish (Mexico)
es-ES    Spanish (Spain)
de-AT    German (Austria)
ja-JP    Japanese (Japan)

💻

Usage in HTML & APIs

<!-- HTML lang attribute -->
<html lang="en">
<html lang="fr-CA">

<!-- Content language -->
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

# HTTP Header
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,fr;q=0.8
Content-Language: en-US

# hreflang for SEO
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="/es/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="/">

# JavaScript Intl
new Intl.DateTimeFormat('de-DE')
new Intl.NumberFormat('ja-JP')