Do you want to declare a Default Language of your website / blog? Then you came with the right place. When a person is creating an international website, blog etc. then it is important to describe its language either using HTML or XML Attributions. On the other hand, it also helps in Search Engine Optimization because by declaring a Language, Search Engine Algorithms won’t have to spend much time in studying and detecting its language manually. Though most of the popular Blogging platforms have built-in language declaration functionality, but Blogger Platform is not a robust platform.
In XML, the coding is bit different but it must be placed inside the <html> Tag. Just like the following example.
Therefore, we have to manage things manually by adding XML or HTML Language attributions. In this article, I will learn you, how a person can declare language of a website with the help of HTML Coding.
If you are a WordPress user, then you have no need to do this, you'll have built-in functionality for declaring website language but blogger users aren't that lucky. If you have a blogger blog then you'll have to manually declare language by adding an HTML or XML code inside your blog template. Which I’m going to show you today, How to do that.
Significant Tips While Declaring Language of a Website:
There are lots of misconceptions in the minds of webmasters, bloggers etc. that how, when and where should they enter the HTML coding to define their website’s language. Fortunately, W3.ORG has provided the detailed information about the whole process. Consider the following tips.
Define the language attribution in each and every page of a website.
Specify the language code in the URL as well while declaring language.
Always utilize language or xml:lang attribution to define language of a website.
Do not add the language attribution in the between <body> </body> tags.
How to Declare Language of a Blog / Website with HTML?
The main idea behind declaring language of a website is to provide friendly experience to different browsers and Search engines. If a person is thinking that after defining Language attributions his SEO will improve then he is committing a mistake because it has low Impact on (SEO) Search Engine Optimization. Furthermore, it will increase the crawling rate because crawlers will be able to fetch your content rather quickly.
Now Follow the below instructions to get started:
According to the prescribed rules by W3C, it’s essential to place the Language attributions inside the <html> tag. Consider the Following coding.
<html lang="en">
...
</html>
...
</html>
In XML, the coding is bit different but it must be placed inside the <html> Tag. Just like the following example.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
...
</html>
...
</html>
Declaring Language in Blogger Platform:
Go To Blogger.com >> Template >> Edit HTML >> Proceed.
In Template, search for <html (Mostly, it will be on Top of the source code) and just next to it paste the following coding.
lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US"
After pasting the above coding in the template, it would somewhat look like the following coding.
<html lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US" b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
Once you have done, save the template by pressing Save Template button.
By default I have set the language attribute to English-United States (en-US) but if your website is of some other language then below is a complete list of languages and their ISO codes. Just replace en-US with your language code and Save Template.
ISO 639-1 Language Codes
ISO 639-1 defines abbreviations for languages. In HTML and XHTML they can be used in the lang and xml:lang attributes.
| Language | ISO Code |
|---|---|
| Abkhazian | ab |
| Afar | aa |
| Afrikaans | af |
| Albanian | sq |
| Amharic | am |
| Arabic | ar |
| Aragonese | an |
| 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 (Belarusian) | be |
| Cambodian | km |
| Catalan | ca |
| Cherokee | |
| Chewa | |
| Chinese (Simplified) | zh |
| Chinese (Traditional) | zh |
| Corsican | co |
| Croatian | hr |
| Czech | cs |
| Danish | da |
| Divehi | |
| Dutch | nl |
| Edo | |
| English | en |
| Esperanto | eo |
| Estonian | et |
| Faeroese | fo |
| Farsi | fa |
| Fiji | fj |
| Finnish | fi |
| Flemish | |
| French | fr |
| Frisian | fy |
| Fulfulde | |
| 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 |
| Hawaiian | |
| Hebrew | he, iw |
| Hindi | hi |
| Hungarian | hu |
| Ibibio | |
| Icelandic | is |
| Ido | io |
| Igbo | |
| Indonesian | id, in |
| Interlingua | ia |
| Interlingue | ie |
| Inuktitut | iu |
| Inupiak | ik |
| Irish | ga |
| Italian | it |
| Japanese | ja |
| Javanese | jv |
| Kannada | kn |
| Kanuri | |
| Kashmiri | ks |
| Kazakh | kk |
| Kinyarwanda (Ruanda) | rw |
| Kirghiz | ky |
| Kirundi (Rundi) | rn |
| Konkani | |
| Korean | ko |
| Kurdish | ku |
| Laothian | lo |
| Latin | la |
| Latvian (Lettish) | lv |
| Limburgish ( Limburger) | li |
| 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 (Afaan Oromo) | om |
| Papiamentu | |
| Pashto (Pushto) | ps |
| Polish | pl |
| Portuguese | pt |
| Punjabi | pa |
| Quechua | qu |
| Rhaeto-Romance | rm |
| Romanian | ro |
| Russian | ru |
| Sami (Lappish) | |
| Samoan | sm |
| Sangro | 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 |
| Spanish | es |
| Sundanese | su |
| Swahili (Kiswahili) | sw |
| Swedish | sv |
| Syriac | |
| Tagalog | tl |
| Tajik | tg |
| Tamazight | |
| Tamil | ta |
| Tatar | tt |
| Telugu | te |
| Thai | th |
| Tibetan | bo |
| Tigrinya | ti |
| Tonga | to |
| Tsonga | ts |
| Turkish | tr |
| Turkmen | tk |
| Twi | tw |
| Uighur | ug |
| Ukrainian | uk |
| Urdu | ur |
| Uzbek | uz |
| Venda | |
| Vietnamese | vi |
| Volapük | vo |
| Wallon | wa |
| Welsh | cy |
| Wolof | wo |
| Xhosa | xh |
| Yi | |
| Yiddish | yi, ji |
| Yoruba | yo |
| Zulu | zu |
So now you'll be able to declare your blog language by using the tutorial given above. I hope this article will be helpful, Please leave your comments below.