Field languages and scripts¶

A document prints what it says in one script or in several. A Greek passport prints the holder's surname in Greek and again in Latin; a Kazakh one does the same in Cyrillic and Latin. Each of those is a separate reading, and every reading carries the language it was made in.

This page states where that language appears, how it is resolved, and every identifier it can be resolved from.

Where the language appears¶

The response carries the same fact twice, deliberately. language is the name the identifier resolves to, which is what a reader renders. The identifier itself stays in the entry's id, so two readings of one field stay distinguishable however their names are spelled.

[
  { "id": "surname@0", "name": "surname", "value": "PARADEIGMA", "language": null },
  { "id": "surname@1032", "name": "surname", "value": "ΠΑΡΑΔΕΙΓΜΑ", "language": "Greek" }
]

The neutral identifier¶

0 is not a language. It is the neutral, transliterated Latin reading — the value the engine merged across sources, spelled in the alphabet the machine-readable zone uses.

It is reported as language: null, because the absence of a language is not a language of its own. Its entries still carry the @0 suffix in their id, so a neutral reading and a national-script reading of one field never collide.

The three steps that resolve it¶

The recognition engine reports a language as one of these integers and nothing else. Resolving it narrows in three steps, and nothing is guessed at any of them.

1. The identifier itself. A value present in the table below resolves to its language, its full name and its IETF tag. 1032 is Greek.
2. The primary language. Failing that, the low 10 bits of the value name a primary language, and the rest select a sublanguage — a region or a script. A sublanguage nobody has assigned still belongs to its language, and saying so is true. 135 primary languages are tabulated for this step.
3. A literal. When even the family is unknown, the answer is Language 0x0ABC, naming the identifier in the hexadecimal the reference is written in.

Step 3 exists because the alternative is worse. An identifier the code did not know used to reach a reader as the bare integer it arrived as. A bare integer is not a language, and cannot be looked up.

What the language is not¶

• Not the language of the document. It is the language of one reading of one field. A single document commonly produces readings in two.
• Not a translation. A national-script reading is what the document prints, and the Latin reading is what the engine transliterated. Neither was translated from the other.
• Not a locale to format with. The identifier's IETF tag is published below as reference, but the value in a result is the language alone.

Every assigned identifier¶

418 identifiers, from the published [MS-LCID] reference as it stood on 2026-09-17. The table is generated from the same module the service resolves a reading through, so a row here is a row the running service uses.

Identifier is the integer an entry's id ends with. Language is what that entry's language reports. Full name is the identifier's own name in the reference, which names the region as well. IETF tag is the BCP 47 tag of the identifier.

The value a language selects¶

The language on an entry decides which spelling its value carries.

A reading whose national-script spelling matches its transliterated one — a document printed only in Latin — produces one entry, not two.

The identifiers a document most often carries¶

Nothing restricts which identifier appears on which document. The pairs below are the ones a European or Central Asian travel document commonly produces beside its Latin reading.

A reading in any of them appears beside the neutral one, not instead of it. A consumer that wants the Latin spelling reads the entry whose language is null; one that wants the printed spelling reads the entry that names a language.