How do I change the value of lang=en-US

I have noticed that in the <html> tag on my WP site that the language is defined as US English.

<html lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">

I would like to change it to British English en-GB but I’m not sure of the best way.

I dug around and found language_attributes() in general-template.php which makes a call to get_bloginfo('language'). I could manually insert the value here but that doesn’t seem like the best way to do it.

What is the proper way to change this value?

2 s
2

The value for that string is normally taken from the option WPLANG in your database table $prefix_options. You can set it in the backend under Settings/General (wp-admin/options-general.php) or per SQL.

There several ways to change that value per PHP:

  1. Create a global variable $locale in your wp-config.php:

    $locale="en_GB";
    
  2. Declare the constant WPLANG in your wp-config.php:

    define( 'WPLANG', 'en_GB' );
    

    This has been deprecated, but it’ll still work.

  3. Filter locale:

    add_filter( 'locale', function() {
        return 'en_GB';
    });
    

    This a very flexible way, because you can add more conditions to that function, for example check the current site ID in a multisite.

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