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8. Content Parameters

8.2 Language Tags

A language tag identifies a natural language spoken, written, or otherwise conveyed by human beings for communication of information to other human beings. Computer languages are explicitly excluded. The HTTP/1.0 protocol uses language tags within the Accept-Language and Content-Language header fields.

The syntax and registry of HTTP language tags is the same as that defined by RFC 1766 [1]. In summary, a language tag is composed of 1 or more parts: A primary language tag and a (possibly empty) series of subtags:

 language-tag	=	primary-tag *( "-" subtag )
 primary-tag	=	1*8ALPHA
 subtag	=	1*8ALPHA
Whitespace is not allowed within the tag and all tags are to be treated as case insensitive. The namespace of language tags is administered by the IANA. Example tags include:

en, en-US, en-cockney, i-cherokee, x-pig-latin
where any two-letter primary-tag is an ISO 639 language abbreviation and any two-letter initial subtag is an ISO 3166 country code.

Note
Earlier versions of this document specified an incomplete language tag, where values were limited to ISO 639 language abbreviations with an optional ISO 3166 country code appended after an underscore ("_") or slash ("/") character. This format was abandoned in favor of the recently proposed standard for Internet protocols.

T. Berners-Lee, R. T. Fielding, H. Frystyk Nielsen - 12 MAR 95

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