Help:Languages

By default, all languages which MediaWiki supports for the user interface are supported in Wikidata too.

Wikidata supports different sets of languages in different places. The main sets are labels, monolingual text, and lexemes.

Labels

Languages which are supported for labels can be used in the box containing labels, descriptions and aliases (sometimes collectively called "terms") on item and properties.

Monolingual text

Languages which are supported for monolingual text can be used when adding statements which have the monolingual text data type.

See Help:Monolingual text languages for more information.

Lexemes

Languages which are supported for lexemes can be used for lemmas, glosses and forms on lexemes.

Adding a language

The best way to add support for a language is to translate enough of the interface on translatewiki.net. Once about 500 of the core MediaWiki messages have been translated, it will be added to MediaWiki and become available everywhere in Wikidata.

Extra languages can also be requested specifically for Wikidata by creating a ticket on Phabricator (add the tags Language codes and Wikidata).

Language codes that should not be used

Not all language codes supported by Wikidata should be used. Some were invented by MediaWiki or used for the wrong language and we now prefer a different language code.

als for Alemannic, use gsw
bat-smg, use sgs
be-x-old, use be-tarask
bh, use bho
de-formal, use de
es-formal, use es
fiu-vro, use vro
hu-formal, use hu
nl-informal, use nl
no, use nb (Norwegian Bokmål) or nn (Norwegian Nynorsk)
roa-rup, use rup
simple, use en
sr-ec, use sr-cyrl for monolingual text and lexemes
sr-el, use sr-latn for monolingual text and lexemes
zh-classical, use lzh
zh-min-nan, use nan
zh-yue, use yue