French
FRIndo-EuropeanFrançais
Spoken by approximately 280 million people worldwide
Writing Systems
Countries
Usage in Code
<!-- HTML lang attribute -->
<html lang="fr">
/* CSS language selector */
:lang(fr) { font-family: sans-serif; }
/* Accept-Language header */
Accept-Language: fr
/* Intl API */
new Intl.DateTimeFormat('fr').format(new Date())About French
French (Français) is a Indo-European language identified by the ISO 639-1 code "fr". It is spoken by approximately 280 million people, primarily in France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal. The language uses the Latin writing system.
In web development, the ISO 639-1 language code is used in HTML lang attributes, HTTP Accept-Language headers, the JavaScript Intl API for locale-aware formatting, and content negotiation. Setting the correct language code improves accessibility for screen readers, enables proper text-to-speech pronunciation, and helps search engines serve content to the right audience. Browsers use this code for spell-checking, hyphenation, and font selection.
For SEO, specifying the content language via the lang attribute and hreflang tags helps search engines understand which language version of a page to show to users in different regions. This is essential for multilingual websites targeting international audiences.