Language Identifiers

Language Identifiers

A language identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation for the language in a country or geographical region. Each language has a unique language identifier (LANGID),  a 16-bit value that consists of a primary language identifier and a sublanguage identifier. The LANGID is constructed using the MAKELANGID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in a LANGID.

+-------------------------+-------------------------+
|  SubLanguage ID  |   Primary Language ID   |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
15                    10  9                         0   bit

There are predefined language identifiers:

LANG_SYSTEM_DEFAULT, which identifies the system default language.
LANG_USER_DEFAULT, which identifies the language of the current user.

An application can retrieve the current language identifiers by using the GetSystemDefaultLangID and GetUserDefaultLangID functions.

For a list of language identifiers, see Table of Language Identifiers.

Table of Language Identifier

The following are language identifiers. They are composed of a primary language identifier and a sublanguage identifier.

The following identifiers were composed using the MAKELANGID macro.

Identifier	Language
0x0000	Language Neutral
0x007f	The language for the invariant locale (LOCALE_INVARIANT). See MAKELCID.
0x0400	Process or User Default Language
0x0800	System Default Language
0x0436	Afrikaans
0x041c	Albanian
0x0401	Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
0x0801	Arabic (Iraq)
0x0c01	Arabic (Egypt)
0x1001	Arabic (Libya)
0x1401	Arabic (Algeria)
0x1801	Arabic (Morocco)
0x1c01	Arabic (Tunisia)
0x2001	Arabic (Oman)
0x2401	Arabic (Yemen)
0x2801	Arabic (Syria)
0x2c01	Arabic (Jordan)
0x3001	Arabic (Lebanon)
0x3401	Arabic (Kuwait)
0x3801	Arabic (U.A.E.)
0x3c01	Arabic (Bahrain)
0x4001	Arabic (Qatar)
0x042b	Windows 2000/XP: Armenian. This is Unicode only.
0x042c	Azeri (Latin)
0x082c	Azeri (Cyrillic)
0x042d	Basque
0x0423	Belarusian
0x0402	Bulgarian
0x0455	Burmese
0x0403	Catalan
0x0404	Chinese (Taiwan)
0x0804	Chinese (PRC)
0x0c04	Chinese (Hong Kong SAR, PRC)
0x1004	Chinese (Singapore)
0x1404	Windows 98/Me, Windows 2000/XP: Chinese (Macau SAR)
0x041a	Croatian
0x0405	Czech
0x0406	Danish
0x0465	Windows XP: Divehi. This is Unicode only.
0x0413	Dutch (Netherlands)
0x0813	Dutch (Belgium)
0x0409	English (United States)
0x0809	English (United Kingdom)
0x0c09	English (Australian)
0x1009	English (Canadian)
0x1409	English (New Zealand)
0x1809	English (Ireland)
0x1c09	English (South Africa)
0x2009	English (Jamaica)
0x2409	English (Caribbean)
0x2809	English (Belize)
0x2c09	English (Trinidad)
0x3009	Windows 98/Me, Windows 2000/XP: English (Zimbabwe)
0x3409	Windows 98/Me, Windows 2000/XP: English (Philippines)
0x0425	Estonian
......	............

 

The following three combinations of usPrimaryLanguage and usSubLanguage have special meaning.

Primary language identifier	Sublanguage identifier	Meaning
LANG_NEUTRAL	SUBLANG_NEUTRAL	Language neutral
LANG_NEUTRAL	SUBLANG_DEFAULT	User default language
LANG_NEUTRAL	SUBLANG_SYS_DEFAULT	System default language

 

 

MAKELANGID

The MAKELANGID macro creates a language identifier from a primary language identifier and a sublanguage identifier.

WORD MAKELANGID(
  USHORT usPrimaryLanguage,  // primary language identifier
  USHORT usSubLanguage       // sublanguage identifier
);

Parameters

usPrimaryLanguage

Specifies the primary language identifier. This parameter can be one in the list of primary language identifiers or a user-defined primary language.

For a user-defined language, usPrimaryLanguage is a value in the range 0x0200 to 0x03FF. All other values are reserved for system use.

usSubLanguage

Specifies the sublanguage identifier. This parameter can be a value from the list of sublanguage identifiers or a user-defined sublanguage.

For a user-defined sublanguage, usSubLanguage is a value in the range 0x20 to 0x3F. All other values are reserved for system use.

Return Values

The return value is a language identifier.