Manual:Language


 * See also Manual:MediaWiki architecture#Languages (should be merged here?)

In MediaWiki, there are various kinds of languages:


 * The site content language (, based on  ), which should generally stay the same as long as the wiki exists.


 * The site content language variant is the default variant when  is implemented for that language.


 * The user interface language ($contextSource->getLanguage formerly ), which can be changed in your preferences or with   in the URL, but also generally remains the same while using the wiki.


 * The page content language. This can be different for each page, even if the site and user language is the same. It is defined in getPageLanguage in Title, representing what language the wikitext source is written in.


 * The page view language aka user language variant which is a language variant of page content language, as preferred by the user. It can also be set through  (or  ) in the URL (e.g. by selecting one of the tabs) if it is a variant of the content language of the page being viewed. It's defined in getPageViewLanguage in Title, representing what language the rendered HTML content is written in.

All three of them are language objects.

Language code

 * Not to be confused with Wikimedia project code; see also Language codes on Meta

A language code is a valid standard abbreviation for a language supported by MediaWiki, which uses such codes as standard identifiers for languages (mostly in accordance with ISO 639-3, except two-letter codes from ISO 639-1 for "established" locales) and exposes or requires them in many points of the interface and code.

In the example below,,   is the language code for.

Uniformity with Unicode standard is needed to provide a good language support, in particular in cooperation with CLDR; having an ISO 639-3 code is one requirement for a language to be added to MediaWiki locales.

Names.php
is the master registry of languages supported by MediaWiki. This is not the same as languages of which MediaWiki will show l10n (JSON files) nor languages of which MediaWiki knows the names (via ), mind you!

Fallback languages


Some languages in MediaWiki have what is known as a "fallback sequence". This is where MediaWiki will fall back on a different language if it cannot find what it needs. An example of this is the language code  (Cajun French), which falls back on the language code   (French). The reason for this is that sometimes languages don't have all messages defined in them.

The fallback for a language can be found in its associated  file. For instance. You can [ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki/browse/master/languages/messages/?grep=fallback%20%3D search the code for all uses]. There is also a plain list from 2020-09 in this phabricator comment.

Site content language
Viewing/getting the site content language



User interface language

 * Default value
 * $contextSource->getLanguage


 * Set via


 * Special:Preferences


 * in the URL (see uselang )


 * (or  ) in the URL if it is a variant of your user language


 * Problems
 * Since interface messages can come from fallback languages but the language is not returned, the actual language of each message is not known.

Page content language

 * Default value


 * $wgLang on special pages.


 * English for CSS and JS pages.


 * For MediaWiki namespace pages, the language depends on the subpage. For example, MediaWiki:Message/ar will be set to Arabic (ar), and MediaWiki:Message will be $wgContLang.


 * All other pages are $wgContLang by default.


 * Configuration
 * Extensions can change all other pages through the hook.  The value for special pages, CSS, JS, and MediaWiki namespace pages cannot be overridden.


 * Examples
 * The Translate extension uses it for the page translation feature. See translatewiki:Project:About/ar as a translation of translatewiki:Project:About. The directionality of the page is thus correctly set to right-to-left for Arabic.


 * Manually changing page language
 * Page language selection is now achievable with help of Special:PageLanguage since MediaWiki 1.24.
 * Users can change content language of a page which is by default the default Wiki language($wgContLang). Language of pages in the MediaWiki namespace can't be changed.
 * The feature needs to be enabled with and the   permission must be granted to a wiki user rights group (who can then perform page language changes).
 * Changing page language causes the source translation page and its units to be moved to the correct target language. In case the target language translation page already exists, the language change isn't allowed.
 * Matching API can be found on API:SetPageLanguage.


 * What does it define?


 * In SkinTemplate, it adds a around the page text. The dir attribute sets the correct writing direction. The lang attribute will always be the root code, e.g. "de" even when "de-formal" is given.


 * For file pages, it is set in ImagePage.php, because there is a lot of HTML that is in the user language.


 * In Parser.php, it sets the table of contents (TOC) numberings, and stuff like grammar, although not really relevant mostly. To do that only, use parserOptions->setTargetLanguage.


 * The direction of the diff text (DifferenceEngine) is set to the page content language. In some cases this is not identical, in which case $diffEngineObject->setTextLanguage( $code ) can be used.


 * Since, it also sets the time and number-formatting magic words, including DIRECTIONMARK, but not NAMESPACE(E), as that really depends on the site language. Note that including a template marked as language A onto a page with language B, will be parsed with language B on that page.


 * Multiple languages on a single page
 * Multiple languages on a single page are in theory not supported, but simple tags can be used to mark text as being written in a different language. If the CSS class is used, the ul/ol lists and editsection will display nicely when the dir tag is opposite to the value of that of the page content language. Things defined in the parser, like TOC and magic words, however, will not change.


 * Viewing/getting the page language


 * JavaScript:  - note that, when e.g. viewing the page history, it will return the page language of the page it is the history of, whereas the history page doesn't have an mw-content-ltr/rtl class. I.e. both "/wiki/Page" and "/w/index.php?title=Page&action=history" will return the language of "Page".


 * The page content language is mentioned on the page info view (, linked in the toolbox)


 * The page content language can be retrieved in the API via api.php?action=query&prop=info

Code structure
First, you have a Language object in. This object contains all the localisable message strings, as well as other important language-specific settings and custom behavior (uppercasing, lowercasing, printing dates, formatting numbers, direction, custom grammar rules etc.).

The object is constructed from two sources: sub-classed versions of itself (classes) and Message files (messages).

There's also the MessageCache class, which handles input of text via the MediaWiki namespace. Most internationalisation is nowadays done via Manual:Messages API objects and by using the  shortcut function, which is defined in. Legacy code might still be using the old  functions, which are now considered deprecated in favor of the above-mentioned Message objects.

See also Manual:Messages API.

Language objects
There are two ways to get a language object. You can use the globals and  for user interface and content language respectively. For an arbitrary language you can construct an object by using by replacing   with the code of the language. You can get, an object of the class, using Dependency Injection.)  You can also use   if   could already be a language object.  The list of codes is in.

<Language objects are needed for doing language-specific functions, most often to do number, time and date formatting, but also to construct lists and other things. There are multiple layers of caching and merging with, but the details are irrelevant in normal use.

Old local translation system
With MediaWiki 1.3.0, a new system was set up for localising MediaWiki. Instead of editing the language file and asking developers to apply the change, users could edit the interface strings directly from their wikis. This is the system in use as of August 2005. People can find the message they want to translate in Special:AllMessages and then edit the relevant string in the  namespace. Once edited, these changes are live. There was no more need to request an update, and wait for developers to check and update the file.

The system is great for Wikipedia projects; however a side effect is that the MediaWiki language files shipped with the software are no longer quite up-to-date, and it is harder for developers to keep the files on meta in sync with the real language files.

As the default language files do not provide enough translated material, we face two problems:


 * 1) New Wikimedia projects created in a language which has not been updated for a long time, need a total re-translation of the interface.
 * 1) Other users of MediaWiki (including Wikimedia projects in the same language) are left with untranslated interfaces. This is especially unfortunate for the smaller languages which don't have many translators.

This is not such a big issue anymore, because translatewiki.net is advertised prominently and used by almost all translations. Local translations still do happen sometimes but they're strongly discouraged. Local messages mostly have to be deleted, moving the relevant translations to translatewiki.net and leaving on the wiki only the site-specific customisation; there's a huge backlog especially in older projects, [//toolserver.org/~robin/?tool=cleanuplocalmsgs this tool] helps with cleanup.

Keeping messages centralised and in sync
English messages are very rarely out of sync with the code. Experience has shown that it's convenient to have all the English messages in the same place. Revising the English text can be done without reference to the code, just like translation can. Programmers sometimes make very poor choices for the default text.

What can be localised
So many things are localisable on MediaWiki that not all of them are directly available on translatewiki.net: see translatewiki:Translating:MediaWiki. If something requires a developer intervention on the code, you can request it on Phabricator, or ask at Support if you don't know what to do exactly.


 * Namespaces (both core and extensions', plus gender-dependent user namespaces)
 * Weekdays (and abbreviations)
 * Months (and abbreviations)
 * Bookstores for Special:BookSources
 * Skin names
 * Math names
 * (for compatibility with old MediaWiki databases)
 * Default user option overrides
 * Language names
 * Country names (via )
 * Currency names (via )
 * Timezones
 * Character encoding conversion via
 * UpperLowerCase first (needs casemaps for some)
 * UpperLowerCase
 * Uppercase words
 * Uppercase word breaks
 * Case folding
 * Strip punctuation for MySQL search (search optimisation)
 * Get first character
 * Alternate encoding
 * Recoding for edit (and then recode input)




 * Fallback languages (that is, other more closely related language(s) to use when a translation is not available, instead of the default fallback, which is English)
 * Directionality (left to right or right to left, RTL)
 * Direction mark character depending on RTL
 * Arrow depending on RTL
 * Languages where italics cannot be used
 * Number formatting (comma-ify, i.e. adding or not digits separators; transform digits; transform separators)
 * Truncate (multibyte)
 * <Grammar conversions for inflected languages
 * Plural transformations
 * Formatting expiry times
 * Segmenting for diffs (Chinese)
 * Convert to variants of language (between different orthographies, or scripts)
 * Language specific user preference options
 * and link prefix, e.g.:  These are letters that can be glued after/before the closing/opening brackets of a wiki link, but appear rendered on the screen as if part of the link (that is, clickable and in the same colour).  By default the link trail is "a-z"; you may want to add the accentuated or non-Latin letters used by your language to the list.
 * Language code (preferably used according to the latest RFC in standard BCP 47, currently, with its associated IANA database. Avoid deprecated, grandfathered and private-use codes: look at what they mean in standard ISO 639, and avoid codes assigned to collections/families of languages in ISO 639-5, and ISO 639 codes which were not imported in the IANA database for BCP 47)
 * Type of emphasising
 * The extension has a special page file per language,   for language code.

Neat functionality:


 * I18N
 * Roman numeral formatting

Namespace name aliases
Namespace name aliases are additional names which can be used to address existing namespaces. They are rarely needed, but not having them when they are, usually creates havoc in existing wikis.

You need namespace name aliases:


 * 1) When a language has variants, and these variants spell some namespaces differently, and you want editors to be able to use the variant spellings.  Variants are selectable in the user preferences.  Users always see their selected variant, except in wikitext, but when editing or searching, an arbitrary variant can be used.


 * 1) When an existing wiki's language, fall back language(s), or localisation is changed, with it are changed some namespace names.  So as not to break the links already present in the wiki, that are using the old namespace names, you need to add each of the altered previous namespace names to its namespace name aliases, when, or before, the change is made.

The generic English namespace names are always present as namespace name aliases in all localisations, so you need not, and should not, add those.

Aliases can't be translated on translatewiki.net, but can be requested there or on bugzilla: see translatewiki:Translating:MediaWiki.

Regional settings
Some linguistic settings vary across geographies; MediaWiki doesn't have a concept of region, it only has languages and language variants.

These settings need to be set once as a language's default, then individual wikis can change them as they wish in their configuration.

Time and date formats
Time and dates are shown on special pages and alike. The default time and date format is used for signatures, so it should be the most used and most widely understood format for users of that language. Also anonymous users see the default format. Registered users can choose other formats in their preferences.

If you are familiar with PHP's time format, you can try to construct formats yourself. MediaWiki uses a similar format string, with some extra features. If you don't understand the previous sentence, that's OK. You can provide a list of examples for.

See #Message sources.