Drupal 8: Get The Current Language

26th April 2016 - 1 minute read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and we will endeavour to correct.

To get the currently selected language on a Drupal 8 site you need to run the following.

$language = \Drupal::languageManager()->getCurrentLanguage()->getId();

This will return the 2 character ISO language code for the language. So for English this would be "en".

To get the language name instead of the language code use this.

$language =  \Drupal::languageManager()->getCurrentLanguage()->getName();

snippet

Drupal

Drupal 8

Comments

Permalink

It,s really helpful. Thank you so much.

Permalink

Short, cool and informative. Thank you!

Permalink

Small remark,

To get the currently selected language for content :

$language = \Drupal::languageManager()->getCurrentLanguage(LanguageInterface::TYPE_CONTENT)->getId();

Permalink

Thank you Philip. I did not have the interface translation enabled so your snipped was always returning the default language. The snipped posted by "tty11" worked. Thanks tty11 :), however I will make a small change to it. Drupal couldn't find "LanguageInterface" in my theme's preprocess function, I had to provide namespace too as follows

$language = \Drupal::languageManager()->getCurrentLanguage(\Drupal\Core\Language\LanguageInterface::TYPE_CONTENT)->getId();

Permalink

Thanks Ejay. I wrote this post during my first few weeks of Drupal 8 development. I've since learned a lot about how the language manager works so there are probably a few contextual issues with my original snippet :)

Add new comment

Related Content

Drupal 9: Loading All Routes From A Module

When creating Drupal modules I like to keep the hard coded components to a minimum. This helps when changing parts of the module in the future as hard coded links and other elements will require manual intervention and slow down maintenance. Sometimes, though, this isn't an option as you just need to have a few routes in your *.routing.yml file that point to controllers or forms within your module.

Drupal 9: Stubbing API Modules For Fun And Profit

If you've been building websites sites for a while you will realise that no site lives in isolation. Almost every site you build integrates with some form of API, and this is especially the case for the more enterprise sites where data is often synchronised back to a CRM system or similar. Drupal's hook and service architecture means that you can easily build integration points to that API to pull in data.

Drupal 9: An Introduction To Services And Dependency Injection

Drupal 8 and 9 are built upon services, with many parts of the system available through dependency injection, so it's important to understand the concepts. Services are a way to wrap objects and use dependency injection to produce a common interface. They are powerful and are used all over Drupal to do pretty much everything.

Drupal 9: Selecting Machine Names For Content Entities And Fields

Naming things is hard^{[citation needed]} and there are a lot of things that you can name when configuring a Drupal site. Picking the right machine names for the different parts of Drupal can make your life easy in the long run. Changing labels is simply a case of tweaking the label in the interface, or through configuration updates. The issue is that once you decide on a machine name for something in Drupal it's pretty much set in stone forever.

Drupal 9: Configuring Drupal To Be An Identity Provider With SimpleSAMLphp

I have previously talked about configuring a Drupal site to authenticate against a remote SimpleSAMLphp install, but as Drupal is an excellent user management system I wanted to turn it around and use Drupal as the identity provider. This means that Drupal would allow users to log into other systems using their Drupal username and password by leveraging the power of SimpleSAMLphp.

Drupal 9: Configuring Drupal To Authenticate Against A Remote SimpleSAMLphp Identity Provider

I have previously talked about installing SimpleSAMLphp using composer, so the next step is setting up the system to actually provide authentication against a SimpleSAMLphp system. As I spend a lot of time using Drupal I wanted to set up the authentication with Drupal and SimpleSAMLphp in order to see how things worked.

First, let's define a couple of terms that are important to this setup.