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Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date.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 I 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

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It,s really helpful. Thank you so much.

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Short, cool and informative. Thank you!

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Small remark,

To get the currently selected language for content :

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

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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();

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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 :)

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