title: Zettelmarkup: Supported Attribute Values for Natural Languages
role: manual
tags: #manual #reference #zettelmarkup #zettelstore
syntax: zmk
backward: 00001007040100 00001007050000
box-number: 1
copyright: (c) 2020-present by Detlef Stern <ds@zettelstore.de>
created: 20210126175322
forward: 00001007040100 00001007050000
lang: en
license: EUPL-1.2-or-later
modified: 20250701130735
published: 20250701130735
visibility: public

With an [attribute](00001007050000) it is possible to specify the natural language of a text region.
This is important, if you want to render your markup into an environment, where this is significant.
HTML is such an environment.

To specify the language within an attribute, you must use the key `lang`.
The language itself is specified according to the language definition of [RFC-5646](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5646).

Examples:

* `{lang=en}` for the english language
* `{lang=en-us}` for the english dialect spoken in the United States of America
* `{lang=de}` for the german language
* `{lang=de-at}` for the german language dialect spoken in Austria
* `{lang=de-de}` for the german language dialect spoken in Germany

The actual [typographic quotations marks](00001007040100) (`""...""`) are derived from the current language.
The language of a zettel (meta key `lang`) can be overwritten by an attribute: `""...""{lang=fr}`.