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TYPO3 v9 has reached its end-of-life September 30th, 2021 and is not maintained by the community anymore. Looking for a stable version? Use the version switch on the top left.

You can order Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) here: TYPO3 ELTS.

Adding Languages¶

The site module allows you to define which languages are active for your site, which languages are available in the frontend and how they should behave.

For an explanation of each of the properties, see below.

Note

Before you can add languages to your site configuration, you need to create records for each language you want to have in your TYPO3 installation, regardless if it should be available for a specific site. To do so, go to the root page (id=0) and create a new record of type "Website Language" there.

When the backend shows the list of available languages - for instance in the page module language selector, when editing records and in the list module - the list of languages is now restricted to those defined by the site module. If there are for instance five language records in the system, but a site configures only three of them for a page tree, only those three are considered when rendering language drop downs.

The language management comes with an option to hide a language in the frontend while allowing it in the backend. This allows editors to start translating pages without them directly being live.

Note

In case no site configuration has been created for a tree, all language records are shown. In this case the Page TSconfig options mod.SHARED.defaultLanguageFlag, mod.SHARED.defaultLanguageLabel and mod.SHARED.disableLanguages settings are also considered - those are obsolete if a site configuration exists.

Language fallbacks can be configured for every language but the default one. A language fallback means that if content is not available in the current language, content of the fallback language will be displayed. This may include multiple fallback levels - for example "Modern Chinese" might fall back to "Chinese (Traditional)" which may then fallback to "English". All languages can be configured separately, so you can have different fallback chains and behavior for each language.

Tip

Used to older TYPO3 versions? The following TypoScript settings will be set based on config.yaml - you don't need to have them in your TypoScript template:

config.language
config.locale_all
config.htmlTag_dir
config.htmlTag_langKey
config.sys_language_uid
config.sys_language_mode
config.sys_language_isocode
config.sys_language_isocode_default

Configuration Properties¶

languageId¶

Datatype: integer
Description: For default/main language for the given site, use value '0'. For additional languages use the TYPO3 sys_language_uid (the uid of the language record on pid 0). Every site should have at last one language configured - with languageId: 0.
Example: 1

title¶

Datatype: string
Description: The internal human-readable name for this language.
Example: English

navigationTitle¶

Datatype: string
Description: Optional navigation title which is used in HMENU.special = language
Example: British

base¶

Datatype: string / URL
Description: Language base. Accepts either a fully qualified URL or a path segment like "/en/".
Example: /uk/

baseVariants¶

Datatype

array

Description

Allows different base URLs for same language. They follow the same syntax as the base variants on the root level of the site config and they get active if the condition matches.

Example

baseVariants:
  -
    base: 'https://de.example.localhost/'
    condition: 'applicationContext == "Development"'
  -
    base: 'https://staging.example.de/'
    condition: 'applicationContext == "Production/Sydney"'
  -
    base: 'https://testing.example.de/'
    condition: 'applicationContext == "Testing/Paris"'

locale¶

Datatype: string / locale
Description: The locale to use for this language (Is set during frontend rendering for example)
Example: en_UK

iso-639-1¶

Datatype: string
Description: Two-letter code for the language according to ISO-639 nomenclature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes)
Example: en

hreflang¶

Datatype: string
Description: Frontend language for hreflang and lang tags.
Example: en-UK

direction¶

Datatype: string
Description: Text direction for content in this language (left-to-right or right-to-left)
Example: ltr

typo3Language¶

Datatype: string
Description: Language Identifier to use in TYPO3 locallang XLIFF files
Example: en

flag¶

Datatype: string
Description: Flag identifier. The flag is for example displayed in the backend page module.
Example: en

fallbackType¶

Datatype

string

Description

Language fallback mode:

strict

Same as fallback but remove the records that are not translated.

If there is no overlay, do not render the default language records, behaves like old hideNonTranslated, and include records without default translation.

fallback

Fall back to other language, if the page does not exist in the requested language. Do overlays, and keep the ones that are not translated.

Behaves like old config.sys_language_overlay = 1 Keep the ones that are only available in default language.

free

Fall back to other language, if the page does not exist in the requested language. But always fetch only records of this specific (available) language.

Behaves like old config.sys_language_overlay = 0

Example

strict

fallbacks¶

Datatype: list of language ids
Description: List of fallback languages. If non has a matching translation, a pageNotFound is thrown.
Example: 0