Drupal 8: Get The Current Language

26th April 2016 - 1 minute read time

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

It,s really helpful. Thank you so much.

Submitted by Sarah Jay on Tue, 08/30/2016 - 20:46

Permalink

Short, cool and informative. Thank you!

Submitted by Josip Rajkovic on Wed, 10/17/2018 - 15:04

Permalink

Small remark,

To get the currently selected language for content :

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

 

Submitted by tty11 on Thu, 02/07/2019 - 09:17

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();

 

Submitted by Ejay Rus on Fri, 12/11/2020 - 09:57

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 :)

Philip Norton

Submitted by philipnorton42 on Fri, 12/11/2020 - 12:15

Permalink

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
7 + 0 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.

Related Content

Drupal 10: Programmatically Injecting Context Into Blocks

29th January 2023

Context definitions in Drupal are really useful when you want to inject context into your plugins and I have been using them for a little while now. It has made building custom blocks to add content to pages much easier as I don't need to copy the same block of code to find an entity of a particular sort into the block plugin.

Read more

Drupal 9: Loading Configuration Entities Using Entity Query

11th December 2022

Whilst working on a module I found that I needed to do something that was difficult to find information for. I think part of that is because the solution is simpler than I was thinking, but it did cause me to get lost in source code and internet issues for a while.

Read more