The Content-Language entity header is used to describe the language(s) intended for the audience, so that it allows a user to differentiate according to the users' own preferred language.
For example, if "Content-Language: de-DE" is set, it says that the document is intended for German language speakers (however, it doesn't indicate the document is written in German. For example, it might be written in English as part of a language course for German speakers. If you want to indicate which 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 | Entity header |
|---|---|
| Forbidden header name | no |
| CORS-safelisted response header | yes |
| CORS-safelisted request header | yes, with the additional restriction that values can only be 0-9, A-Z, a-z, space or *,-.;=. |
Syntax
Content-Language: de-DE Content-Language: en-US Content-Language: de-DE, en-CA
Directives
language-tag- Multiple language tags are separated by comma. Each language tag is a sequence of one or more case-insensitive subtags, each separated by a hyphen character ("
-",%x2D). In most cases, a language tag consists of a primary language subtag that identifies a broad family of related languages (e.g., "en" = English), which 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 formaly defined in RFC 5646, 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">
Do not use this meta element like this for stating a document language:
<!-- /!\ This is bad practice --> <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="de">
Indicating a target audience for a resource
The Content-Language header is used to specify the intended audience of the page, and can indicate that this is more than one language.
Content-Language: de, en
Specifications
| Specification | Title |
|---|---|
| RFC 7231, section 3.1.3.2: Content-Language | Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content |
Browser compatibility
The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.
| Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Content-Language | Chrome Full support Yes | Edge Full support 12 | Firefox Full support Yes | IE Full support Yes | Opera Full support Yes | Safari Full support Yes | WebView Android Full support Yes | Chrome Android Full support Yes | Firefox Android Full support Yes | Opera Android Full support Yes | Safari iOS Full support Yes | Samsung Internet Android Full support Yes |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support