Ancient and modern languages and scripts leiden

The language of a document, or a subsection of a document, must be explicitly indicated by means of TEI-standard mechanisms and internationally agreed codes for the identification of languages and scripts (see: Language tags in HTML and XML). All codes for language and script combinations to be used in the document must be locally declared in the profileDesc sub-element of the teiHeader. See further: Specifying available languages and scripts

Once all the needed language and script combinations have been defined, the primary (default) language of a document must be indicated. This is accomplished by placing the TEI lang attribute on the top-level tag (document element) and populating it with the appropriate language/script code. For projects producing full EpiDoc XML documents, this will commonly be the TEI.2, although in some instances a first-level div element will be more appropriate. For projects that are using EpiDoc solely for textual transcription (i.e., Leiden-conformant EpiDoc only), the lang attribute must be placed on the outermost (top-level) tag.

Text in a language other than the default language of the document should also be indicated by the use of the lang attribute, attached to the most appropriate encapsulating element. When there is no element that adequately brackets only the text in the secondary language or script, the TEI foreign element (together with the lang attribute) can be introduced to serve this purpose.