How to mark up paragraphs that are in a different language?

**5tevooo** · Nov 21, 2006 09:50

I have an English language website, but one page in particular will have 2 or 3 paragraphs of Welsh text in addition to the English text on the same page.

What would be the correct way to mark these Welsh paragraphs up? Is it sufficient to just stick the text in <p> tags, or should the language change be flagged up explicitly in some other way?

The only reference to language I have in the code at the moment is in the header...

Code:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-GB">

Is there anything I should add to this, or is there something I should put inline in the <p> tags (e.g. lang="CY" or something similar?)

Thanks.

**5tevooo** · Nov 21, 2006 09:55

Should probably just add that the doctype I'm using is XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

**gnarly** · Nov 21, 2006 09:57

Aye, use the lang attribute on whatever HTML elements are in another language, e.g.

HTML Code:

<p lang="fr"></p>
<span lang="en-cockney"></span>
<h4 lang="x-klingon"></h4>

**5tevooo** · Nov 21, 2006 11:04

Great, thanks a lot.

**AutisticCuckoo** · Nov 21, 2006 11:47

Originally Posted by 5tevooo

Should probably just add that the doctype I'm using is XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

In that case, you should use both lang and xml:lang to specify the language (unless you're actually serving the document as XHTML, in which case you only need to use xml:lang).

HTML Code:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-GB" lang="en-GB">

User Tag List

Thread: How to mark up paragraphs that are in a different language?

Thread Tools

Display

How to mark up paragraphs that are in a different language?

Bookmarks

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions