Content-Language

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The HTTP Content-Language {{Glossary("representation header")}} is used to describe the language(s) intended for the audience, so users can differentiate it according to their own preferred language.

For example, Content-Language: de-DE indicates that the document is intended for German language speakers. The document may be written in English, not German, as part of a language course for German speakers. To indicate the language the document is written in, use the lang attribute instead.

If no Content-Language is specified, the default is that the content is intended for all language audiences. Multiple language tags are also possible, as well as applying the Content-Language header to various media types and not only to textual documents.

Header type	`{{Glossary("Representation header")}}`
`{{Glossary("Forbidden request header")}}`	No
`{{Glossary("CORS-safelisted response header")}}`	Yes
`{{Glossary("CORS-safelisted request header")}}`	Yes*

* Values can only be 0-9, A-Z, a-z, a space, or the characters *,-.;=.

Syntax

Content-Language: de-DE
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Language: de-DE, en-CA

Directives

language-tag
- : Multiple language tags are separated by a comma. Each language tag is a sequence of one or more case-insensitive subtags, each separated by a hyphen character (-). In most cases, a language tag consists of a primary language subtag that identifies a broad family of related languages (e.g., en = English) and is optionally followed by a series of subtags that refine or narrow that language’s range (e.g., en-CA = the variety of English as communicated in Canada).

[!NOTE] Language tags are formally defined in BCP 47, which rely on the ISO 639 standard (quite often the ISO 639-1 code list) for language codes to be used.

Examples

Indicating the language a document is written in

The global lang attribute is used on HTML elements to indicate the language of an entire HTML document or parts of it.

<html lang="de">
  …
</html>

Do not use this meta element to state the document language, as shown below:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="de" />

Indicating a target audience for a resource

The Content-Language header is used to specify the page’s intended audience and can indicate that this is more than one language.

Content-Language: de, en

Specifications

{{Specifications}}

Browser compatibility

{{Compat}}

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