Get language in javascript

Is there anyway to detect OS language using javascript?

I need to detect OS language using javascript so I can view my page depending on the language. I know that we can detect the browser language but that is not enough for me. I need Operation System language Thanks in advance

You can’t do it. You can have your user explicitly select a language, or you can obey the language(s) listed in the «Accept-Language» header.

6 Answers 6

There is no cross-browser way to do this. Internet Explorer supports the following:

• navigator.browserLanguage : browser language
• navigator.systemLanguage : Windows system language
• navigator.userLanguage : Windows user-specific language

But there is no way to access these settings from any other browsers (that I can tell) so don’t use them: stick to the standard navigator.language (corresponding to the browser language) if you want to maintain cross-browser functionality. If you do use them you will tie your web site to a specific family of operating systems (i.e. Windows) and a specific browser (i.e. Internet Explorer). Do you really want to do this?

Why is the browser language insufficient for your application?

No, IE only I’m afraid. However, this stuff is complicated. However, I think you should think long and hard about why the browser’s language is not sufficient.

about your question, Why is the browser language insufficient for your application? I have pages for each language, I want after detect the OS language to redirect to this page or display it because sometime the browser language maybe not the same of OS

@SzamDev: That’s your user’s problem, not yours. If they’re lying to you, well, they should fix that. You’re dealing with the browser, so that’s the language you should be dealing with.

This returns the system language:

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale 

Why the heck this isn’t the right answer? It works perfectly in the main browsers. I tested in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer (Microsoft Edge).

The question was asked 12 years ago, so that’s a thing. I’m interested in seeing if Stack Overflow ever gets better at changing answers over time.

You may just guess OS language considering few factors:

Windows OS

Internet Explorer

• navigator.browserLanguage : IE language (menu, help and etc.), the same as OS display language (if user hasn’t change it). As in Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Keyboards and Lanugages -> Display language
• navigator.systemLanguage : as in Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Location
• navigator.userLanguage : as in Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Formats

ECMAScript Internationalization API

var d=new Date(Date.UTC(2014,1,26,3,0,0)); var dateFormat=; var result = d.toLocaleDateString("i-default",dateFormat); alert(result); //e.g. for Russian format ( Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Formats ) //result == 'среда, 26 февраля 2014 г.' 

Then search result on your server over preliminary generated set of formatted dates in different languages.

NB! Chrome returns date formatted in its UI language.

Adobe Flash

If you desperately need to know OS language — embed flash in your page and exploit flash.system.Capabilities.language:

NB! Chrome doesn’t allow the trick — Chrome’s Flash always shows browser.language , I think because it has own Flash.

Firefox and Chrome

navigator.language tells you a browser’s UI language (menu, help and etc.) and you may assume that in overwhelming majority of cases it matches OS language (especially for home computers): while downloading FF or Chrome a download page is displayed according user’s then browser — on Windows it is IE in the same language as OS.

It is very strange indeed that Chrome is thing in itself when dealing with browser’s environment parameters, alas.

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Navigator: language property

The Navigator.language read-only property returns a string representing the preferred language of the user, usually the language of the browser UI.

Value

A string representing the language version as defined in RFC 5646: Tags for Identifying Languages (also known as BCP 47). Examples of valid language codes include «en», «en-US», «fr», «fr-FR», «es-ES», etc.

Note that in Safari on iOS prior to 10.2, the country code returned is lowercase: «en-us», «fr-fr» etc.

Examples

if (/^en\b/.test(navigator.language))  doLangSelect(window.navigator.language); > 

Specifications

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also

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Language name from ISO 639-1 code in Javascript

I’m building a website where people can associate a language information to content. The website uses Javascript heavily and the language information associated to various elements is treated internally as an ISO 639-1 code. How to show a list of language names — in the language of the user ?

7 Answers 7

There is a native support for this in the new(ish) Intl API:

let languageNames = new Intl.DisplayNames(['en'], ); languageNames.of('fr'); // "French" languageNames.of('de'); // "German" languageNames.of('fr-CA'); // "Canadian French" 

There are some similar questions on stackoverflow. I needed a javascript function for getting English names and Native names for different languages. I found a nice json formatted list of ISO 693-1 language codes on stackoverflow (based on wikipedia) and created a gist with two functions getLanguageName and getLanguageNativeName. Here is how to use it:

getLanguageNativeName("cv"); // --> "чӑваш чӗлхи" getLanguageName("cv"); // --> "Chuvash" getLanguageNativeName("cv-RU"); // --> "чӑваш чӗлхи" getLanguageName("cv-RU"); // --> "Chuvash" 

This is almost it. But it only shows the language name in two languages. For instance, there is a dropbown on my site to associate a language to some content. If a french guy uses my site and want to select «german», it should show «allemand» (french name for the german language). Same for a chinese visitor etc.

If you want a name of an arbitrary language in an arbitrary language (e.g, how to say «Korean language» in Japanese), you can use Unicode CLDR data.

To use it in JavaScript, you may use cldr NPM package like:

cldr.extractLanguageDisplayNames('it').en; # => 'inglese' 

But not sure if the package only supports Node.js or also supports browsers. If not, you may search for other libraries or write your own code to parse CLDR directly.

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How to determine user’s locale within browser?

THe only way a browser can share meta data about its user and the request is via URLs and headers. Grab Firefox and take a peek at the headers being sent when a request is made. Its quite interesting to examine typical request and response headers.

10 Answers 10

The proper way is to look at the HTTP Accept-Language header sent to the server. This contains the ordered, weighted list of languages the user has configured their browser to prefer.

Unfortunately this header is not available for reading inside JavaScript; all you get is navigator.language , which tells you what localised version of the web browser was installed. This is not necessarily the same thing as the user’s preferred language(s). On IE you instead get systemLanguage (OS installed language), browserLanguage (same as language ) and userLanguage (user configured OS region), which are all similarly unhelpful.

If I had to choose between those properties, I’d sniff for userLanguage first, falling back to language and only after that (if those didn’t match any available language) looking at browserLanguage and finally systemLanguage .

If you can put a server-side script somewhere else on the net that simply reads the Accept-Language header and spits it back out as a JavaScript file with the header value in the string, eg.:

var acceptLanguage= 'en-gb,en;q=0.7,de;q=0.3'; 

then you could include a pointing at that external service in the HTML, and use JavaScript to parse the language header. I don’t know of any existing library code to do this, though, since Accept-Language parsing is almost always done on the server side.

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How can I get the browser language in node.js (express.js)?

User requests some page and I want to know (on server side) what is the language in his/her browser. So I could render template with the right messages.
On client side it’s easy:

var language = window.navigator.userLanguage || window.navigator.language 

5 Answers 5

You can use req.headers[«accept-language»] to get the language/locale the user has set in his browser.

For easier support, you may want to look into a locale module.

req.headers[«accept-language»] returns : «uk,ru;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3» Selected language is «uk». How to get this language from the list ?

@OlegDats The locale module will help you parse that, but basically it means is, the user wants the locales (in preference order) uk (UK English), ru (Russian), en-us (US English), en (plain english), the q is a weight factor, higher q means higher preference.

@JoachimIsaksson uk is not uk english, that would be ‘en-gb’. Probably uk is Ukranian. The first two letters are always lanuages, not regions.

request.acceptsLanguages will contain a parsed version of request.headers[‘accept-language’] .

In Express 4 you can use req.acceptedLanguages as a way to check if the user accepts a single or list of languages. Check it out: blog.hubii.com/dev-detecting-header-language-on-express-js

With Express 4.x, you can use the build in req.acceptsLanguages(lang [, . ]) to check if certain languages are accepted.

var express = require('express'); app.get('/translation', function(request, response) < var lang = request.acceptsLanguages('fr', 'es', 'en'); if (lang) < console.log('The first accepted of [fr, es, en] is: ' + lang); . >else < console.log('None of [fr, es, en] is accepted'); . >>); 

To get the list of all accepted languages, using Express 4.x, you can use the module accepts.

var express = require('express'), accepts = require('accepts'); app.get('/translation', function(request, response) < console.log(accepts(request).languages()); . >); 

Actually, req.acceptsLanguages just does an apply using the accepts module under-the-hood, so if you don’t pass it any arguments you will get the same list of languages (as an array in order of preference). Be aware that isn’t documented behavior though, the Express docs say that the lang argument is required.

Middleware to set the request language and use it globally:

// place this middleware before declaring any routes app.use((req, res, next) => < // This reads the accept-language header // and returns the language if found or false if not const lang = req.acceptsLanguages('bg', 'en') if (lang) < // if found, attach it as property to the request req.lang = lang >else < // else set the default language req.lang = 'en' >next() >) 

Now you can access ‘req.lang’

Example using translation

const translate = < en: < helloWorld: "Hello World!" >, bg: < helloWorld: "Здравей Свят!" >> app.get('/hello-world', (req, res) => < res.send(translate[req.lang].helloWorld) >) 

You would need to parse the string in req.headers[«accept-language»] . Which will give you a priority list of preferred languages from the client. You can also check req.acceptsLanguages(lang [, . ]) if your language is supported or not.

I would strongly recommend to use express-request-language to do any language matching work, since it could be very difficult to get it right at the first time.

Most of the time, matching a language is not enough. A user might want to change a preferred language. express-request-language help you store a preferred language in a cookie it also gives your server a URL path to change a preferred language.

All above functionality can be done with just a couple of lines of code:

app.use(requestLanguage(< languages: ['en-US', 'zh-CN'], cookie: < name: 'language', options: < maxAge: 24*3600*1000 >, url: '/languages/' > >)); 

In case of no match, the middleware will also match a default language ( en-US above).

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