HTML language code

Question

I have small sections of text on my site that are in French (Canadian). When I look up on the W3schools language code reference, I find there is only a list of specific languages but not location. Is writing <span lang="fr-CA"> valid? Does adding the location-base of the language have any impact at all on screen-readers?

Answer 1

Yes, <span lang="fr-CA"> is valid, but you should not expect it to provide any benefits over <span lang="fr"> in most cases. In fact I have used a screen reader that recognized a few values for the lang tag but only when simply codes like en and fr were used.

According to HTML5 PR, the lang attribute value is a language code, or “language tag” as they call it, as defined in BCP 47, which is a concatenation of RFCs Tags for Identifying Languages and Matching of Language Tags. It defines a rather complicated system of codes. Most of the possibilities have no use in HTML in practice, now or in the foreseeable future. The code system has been defined to meet many different needs, including bibliographic information and text databases.

Using fr-CA is possible in accordance with RFC 5646, clause 2.2.4. Region Subtag:

Region subtags are used to indicate linguistic variations associated with or appropriate to a specific country, territory, or region. Typically, a region subtag is used to indicate variations such as regional dialects or usage, or region-specific spelling conventions. It can also be used to indicate that content is expressed in a way that is appropriate for use throughout a region, for instance, Spanish content tailored to be useful throughout Latin America.

The subtag CA is the ISO 3166-1 country code for Canada, so fr-CA denotes French as spoken and written in Canada, i.e. Canadian French. It is possible that a screen reader that can speak French in different variants and recognizes lang attributes will use Canadian pronunciation for an element that has lang="fr-CA". However, this is probably very theoretical and would be of little practical impact if it were actually implemented.

More realistically, such an attribute may have other effects. If you open an HTML document in MS Word, it will recognize lang attributes. Whether this has any practical impact depends on whether and how Word treats Canadian French as differently from French in general e.g. in spelling checks.