What is the language attribute?

What it looks like

The language attribute is written as lang on the html element, the element that wraps the whole page.

<html lang="en">

The value is a short language code, such as en for English, es for Spanish or de for German. A region can be added, as in en-US or pt-BR.

If one part of a page is in another language, that part can carry its own lang attribute.

<p lang="fr">Bon appétit</p>

Why it matters

• Screen readers. A screen reader uses the attribute to choose the right pronunciation. Without it, English text may be read aloud with the rules of another language.
• Translation tools. Browsers and translation tools use it to work out which language they are translating from.
• Browsers. It helps with details such as hyphenation and spell checking in forms.

Like alt text, it is mostly there for accessibility. For search it is a minor detail, because Google works out the language of a page from the visible text. It is still one of the small settings every page should have, along with a viewport tag and a title tag.

The lang attribute is not the same as hreflang. The lang attribute describes the page it is on. Hreflang is a separate set of tags that tells search engines about other language versions of the same page at other addresses.

How to check yours

1. Open the page, right-click and choose View page source.
2. Find the html element in the first lines and read its lang value.
3. If it is missing or wrong, change the site language in your site settings. Most website builders set the attribute from that setting.
4. Run the free audit. It reports a page with no language set.