What is the difference between html lang en and html lang en-US

Question

What is the difference between  lt html lang  en  gt  and  lt html lang  en-US  gt   What other values can follow the dash   According to w3 org  Any two-letter subcode is understood to be a  ISO3166  country code   so does that mean any value listed under the alpha-2 code is an accepted value

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Well  the first question is easy  There are many ens  Englishes  but  mostly  only one US English  One would guess there are en-CN  en-GB  en-AU   Guess there might even be Austrian English but that s more yes you can than yes there is

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This should help   http   www w3 org International articles language-tags   The golden rule when creating language tags is to keep the tag as short as possible  Avoid region  script or other subtags except where they add useful distinguishing information  For instance  use ja for Japanese and not ja-JP  unless there is a particular reason that you need to say that this is Japanese as spoken in Japan  rather than elsewhere  The list below shows the various types of subtag that are available  We will work our way through these and how they are used in the sections that follow  language-extlang-script-region-variant-extension-privateuse

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XML Schema requires that the xml namespace be declared and imported before using xml lang  and other xml namespace values  RELAX NG predeclares the xml namespace  as in XML  so no additional declaration is needed

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RFC 3066 gives the details of the allowed values  emphasis and links added    All 2-letter subtags are interpreted as ISO 3166 alpha-2 country codes from  ISO 3166   or subsequently assigned by the ISO 3166 maintenance agency or governing standardization bodies  denoting the area to which this language variant relates   I interpret that as meaning any valid  according to ISO 3166  2-letter code is valid as a subtag  The RFC goes on to state   Tags with second subtags of 3 to 8 letters may be registered with IANA  according to the rules in chapter 5 of this document   By the way  that looks like a typo  since chapter 3 seems to relate to the the registration process  not chapter 5  A quick search for the IANA registry reveals a very long list  of all the available language subtags  Here s one example from the list  which would be used as en-scouse    Type  variant Subtag  scouse Description  Scouse Added  2006-09-18 Prefix  en Comments  English Liverpudlian dialect known as  Scouse   There are all sorts of subtags available  a quick scroll has already revealed fr-1694acad  17th century French    The usefulness of some of these  I would say the vast majority of these  tags  when it comes to documents designed for display in the browser  is limited  The W3C Internationalization specification simply states   Browsers and other applications can use information about the language of content to deliver to users the most appropriate information  or to present information to users in the most appropriate way  The more content is tagged and tagged correctly  the more useful and pervasive such applications will become   I m struggling to find detailed information on how browsers behave when encountering different language tags  but they are most likely going to offer some benefit to those users who use a screen reader  which can use the tag to determine the language dialect accent in which to present the content

User · Answer

lt html lang  en  gt     lt html lang  en-US  gt    The first lang tag only specifies a language code   The second specifies a language code  followed by a country code      What other values can follow the dash   According to w3 org  Any   two-letter subcode is understood to be a  ISO3166  country code   so   does that mean any value listed under the alpha-2 code is an accepted   value    Yes  however the value may or may not have any real meaning    lt html lang  en-US  gt  essentially means  this page is in the US style of English    In a similar way   lt html lang  en-GB  gt  would mean  this page is in the United Kingdom style of English    If you really wanted to specify an invalid combination  you could   It wouldn t mean much  but  lt html lang  en-ES  gt  is valid according to the specification  as I understand it   However  that language country combination won t do much since English isn t commonly spoken in Spain      I mean does this somehow further help the browser to display the page    It doesn t help the browser to display the page  but it is useful for search engines  screen readers  and other things that might read and try to interpret the page  besides human beings

User · Answer

You can use any country code  yes  but that doesn t mean a browser or other software will recognize it or do anything differently because of it  For example  a screen reader might deal with  en-US  and  en-GB  the same if they only support an American accent in English  Another piece of software that has two distinct voices  though  could adjust according to the country code

[html] What is the difference between <html lang="en"> and <html lang="en-US">?

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