- Functionality
- Implementation

| Functionality |

The `xml:lang` can be used to determine the language for a node or a node-set. The attribute can be used to store language-specific data in an XML document:

        <phrases>
          <greeting xml:lang="en">Hello!</greeting>
          <greeting xml:lang="no">Hei!</greeting>
          <greeting xml:lang="fr">Salut!</greeting>
          <greeting xml:lang="es">Hola!</greeting>
          <greeting xml:lang="de">Sweinhund!</greeting>
        </phrases>

The XSL stylesheet can use the `lang()` function to select the element with the desired language:

        <xsl:template match="greeting">
          <xsl:if test="lang("de")>
            <xsl:value-of select="."/>
            <xsl:text> Grossglucklicher wunche!</xsl:text>
          </xsl:if>
        </xsl:template>

| Implementation |

The DOM interface has been given a method that returns the language for a given node. The language is returned as a string (on whatever format is used in the XML document - should be iso), and may be null if no language is defined.

        public String DOM.getLanguage(int node);

The BasisLibrary class has a static method that will compare the language of the context node with some other language and return the result as a boolean.

        public static boolean BasisLibrary.testLanguage(String language, DOM dom, int node);

The compiled code for the `lang()` method calls this method in the BasisLibrary and leaves the result on the stack for the calling element.

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