HTML/Language codes

In HTML, the  attribute can be used to declare the language of a Web page or a portion of it. The purpose of this attribute is to assist search engines and browsers.

An example of how to use it:

And in XHTML:

The ISO 639 standard is used for defining language abbreviations. For two letter abbreviations, ISO 639-1 is used; for three letter abbreviations, 639-2 and 639-3 is used.

The list of ISO 639-1 codes is below: