Are there constants for language codes in java or in a java library?

Question

Are there any constants for language codes like "en" or "de" in java or in a java library? (Or is using the strings OK?)

I know that something like

Locale.COUNTRY-NAME.getLanguage()

would work, but I am searching for something more streamlined like

Locale.LANGUAGE-NAME

Answer 1

I am afraid there aren't constants for all languages. You do have several predefined Locales such as Locale.UK Locale.US, etc. Each locale has a language code which can be obtained via the getLanguage() method.

To get all language code supported by the underlying JVM use getISOLanguages()

for(String lang : Locale.getISOLanguages()) {
  System.out.println(lang);
}

More details: http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html

Answer 2

The 2-letter language codes are defined by ISO 639-1 standard. The java.util.Locale class does not contain them all, but only Locales supported by the VM (as per Locale.getAvailableLocales()).

The easiest way to access all ISO 639-1 language codes in Java is to rely on the International Components for Unicode project (ICU4J) — an extensive, widely used and actively developed i18n library from IBM. You can get the list of all languages from the ULocale class: com.ibm.icu.util.ULocale.getISOLanguages().