The IETF has published RFC 5646, an update of Tags for Identifying Languages. This specification obsoletes former RFCs 4646, 3066 and 1766.

RFC 5646 makes it possible to use over 7,000 three-letter ISO 639-3 language codes, in addition to the 2 letter codes that have been in use for some time. It also introduces 220 ‘extended language’ subtags, mainly for backwards compatibility.

It continues to be best to refer to this specification as BCP47. This is a non-changing name and web address that points to the latest relevant RFCs.

The Internationalization Working Group at the W3C is working on an article to help users choose language tags, given the various types of subtag that are now available, and the sheer number of subtags.

You can look up language and other subtags in the IANA Language Subtag Registry.

(Richard Ishida has provided an unofficial tool for searching the registry that also provides advice for choosing subtags, and allows you to partially validate a hyphen-separated language tag.)

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser – Translation Company, the following articles have been translated into Hungarian.

Mikor használjunk nyelvi egyeztetést (When to use language negotiation)
Útmutató: A Nyelv Deklarálása XHTML-ben és HTML-ben (Tutorial: Declaring Language in XHTML and HTML)
Szöveg nyelv nélküli címkézése (Tagging text with no language)
Miért használjuk a nyelv attribútumot? (Why use the language attribute?)
HTTP és meta a nyelvi információhoz (HTTP and meta for language information)

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser – Translation Company, the following article has been translated into Hungarian.

Karakterkódolások kezdőknek (Character encodings for beginners)

Thanks to the English to Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

El tamaño del texto en la traducción (Text size in translation)

Imágenes de fondo que admiten la localización (Background images that support localization)

Estilos con el atributo lang (Styling using the lang attribute)

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser – Translation Company, the following articles have been translated into Hungarian.

Karakterkódolások (Character encodings)

Dokumentum karakter beállítás (Document character set)

Megjelenítési problémák amelyeket az UTF-8 BOM okoz (Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM)

Thanks to Trusted Translations Inc. the FAQ-based article “Bidi Space Loss” has now been translated into French, German and Italian.

Perte d’espace bidi

Bidirektionaler Leerzeichenverlust

Perdita di spazio Bidi

The tests of font linking and eot fonts were updated, along with the associated results pages. The number of tests was reduced to a single test per script, but test cases were created for HTML4, XHTML 1.1 and XHTML served as both text/html and XML. In addition, links to font licence information were added to the test notes. The Urdu font was also updated.

The tests are linked from here:

Font linking tests

EOT tests

The results can be found here:

Font linking tests

EOT tests

Thanks to Jens Meiert the following ’getting-started’ article has been translated into German.

Internationalisierungstips für das Web (Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web)

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following article has been translated into Spanish.

CSS3 y texto internacional (CSS3 and International Text)

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser – Translation Company, the following articles have been translated into Hungarian.

Az (X)HTML oldal kódolásának megváltoztatása UTF-8-ra (Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8)

A Nyelv a Weben (Language on the Web)

Bevezető a Karakterkészletekbe és Karakterkódolásba (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings)