The lang attribute

lang declares the human language of content so browsers, screen readers and search engines handle it correctly — hyphenation, quotation marks, and above all pronunciation. Two levels: the whole page carries a lang on <html> (WCAG 3.1.1 Language of Page), and any passage in a different language gets its own lang on a wrapping element (3.1.2 Language of Parts, AA). Without the second, a screen reader reads the foreign words with the page’s voice — Swedish “hej” mangled by an English synthesiser.

Values are BCP 47 tags. Use the shortest adequate one: sv, not sv-SE — a region subtag only earns its place when it changes meaning or pronunciation, and screen readers key off the primary subtag anyway. Two things you should not mark: 3.1.2 exempts proper names and words that have become part of the surrounding vernacular, so not every foreign word needs a span.

In jedee

The site is lang="en" (meta.lang). Swedish appears in a few places, each marked at the smallest scope.

Inline, on the homepage — a span around the Swedish alone, never the English paragraph:

<h1><span lang="sv">Hej hej!</span> I'm Johan.</h1>

“Malmö” beside it is left unmarked — a proper name.

A whole-Swedish note — bethink-yourselves is entirely a Swedish quote (English title). The layout is shared, so the body is wrapped in the content file, with blank lines so markdown-it still parses inside:

<div lang="sv">

På sin tid suckade Jesus i förväntan …

</div>

A Swedish title — hej-fran-min-telefon is Swedish in both title and body. The body is wrapped as above; the title sets titleLang: sv in front matter, which the entry-header h1 carries. A front-matter titleLang wins over the activity detection below, so any post type can use it.

Activity captions — almost all Swedish, so activities.json defaults captionLang: sv and activity.njk puts it on the .e-content wrapper; the one English caption overrides with captionLang: en in its front matter (front matter beats directory data).

Activity titles — a genuine Swedish/English mix from Strava that keeps importing, so the language is detected, not hand-tagged. _config/utils/looks-swedish.js flags a title Swedish only on a Swedish letter or word; eleventyComputed sets titleLang for activities; the shared entry-header.njk h1 and the breadcrumb leaf carry it. Conservative by design — English titles and bare proper-noun event codes (“Keps-OL”) stay at en, which 3.1.2 exempts anyway. “Orientering” (sv) matches but “Orienteering” (en) doesn’t; the spelling carries the language. The detector sits in _config/utils/, not _data/, because a named export beside a _data/*.js default export makes Eleventy drop the default.

The pa11y test does not catch any of this: it flags invalid lang values, not missing ones, and its ten configured paths include no activity post or note (/activities/ is the index, not an activity page). The mixed-language titles are also a clean case of the pattern in The authoring tool decides the data model — when the authoring path (Strava) can’t record a field reliably, compute it at build time.

Raw source: src/_raw/dev-notes/How Swedish text is marked with lang.md