Category:Language icon templates

The pages listed in this category are meant to be function templates, i.e. templates that produce text, images or other elements.

Further template category notes

This category contains pages in the template namespace. It should not be used to categorize articles or pages in other namespaces.

To add a template to this category:

If the template has a separate documentation page (usually called "Template:template name/doc"), add
[[Category:Language icon templates]]
to the <includeonly> section at the bottom of that page. Otherwise, add
<noinclude>[[Category:Language icon templates]]</noinclude>
to the end of the template code, making sure it starts on the same line as the code's last character.

These are the templates used for indicating the language used by a reference, link or item in a bibliography. Use them in articles as {{xx icon}}, replacing xx with the appropriate language code, which can be found in the "Alpha-2" column of the List of ISO 639-2 codes.

Notes

Language codes do not always coincide with country codes (see the list of ISO 3166-1 codes).
Pages that use these templates' codes may appear here improperly. It means they use a template where the Category tag has not been masked with a <noinclude> tag. Category tags must appear as <noinclude>[[Category:Language icon templates|xx]]</noinclude>.
All templates should be children of {{Link language}}, so that style variations can be implemented in one place only, and consistency is much easier to maintain.
For the correct placement and other details, please follow the manual of style guidelines for links to foreign-language sites.
In practice the incorrect and undocumented usage {{xx}} will sometimes generate the same display as {{xx icon}}, so long as {{xx}} is not otherwise defined; this usage is found in Wikipedia, but will retroactively become incorrect if a new {{xx}} template is created. For example, as of January 2013^[update] both {{es icon}} (in Spanish) and {{es}} (in Spanish) generate the same output (until a distinct {{es}} icon is defined); but {{cn icon}} generates (Chinese) while {{cn}} generates "^{[citation needed]}".