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An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code that is used to identify human languages on the Internet.[1] The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)[1] in Best Current Practice (BCP) 47;[1] the subtags are maintained by the IANA Language Subtag Registry.[2][3][4]
To distinguish language variants for countries, regions, or writing systems (scripts), IETF language tags combine subtags from other standards such as ISO 639, ISO 15924, ISO 3166-1 and UN M.49.
For example, the tag en
stands for English; es-419
for Latin American Spanish; rm-sursilv
for Romansh Sursilvan; sr-Cyrl
for Serbian written in Cyrillic script; nan-Hant-TW
for Min Nan Chinese using traditional Han characters, as spoken in Taiwan; yue-Hant-HK
for Cantonese using traditional Han characters, as spoken in Hong Kong; and gsw-u-sd-chzh
for Zürich German.
It is used by computing standards such as HTTP,[5] HTML,[6] XML[7] and PNG.[8]