W3C I18N Q&A: Which languages are right-to-left (RTL) or bidirectional (bidi)?

Which languages are right-to-left (RTL) or bidirectional (bidi)?

Languages generally do have a preferred script, scripts in turn have a particular writing direction. The following scripts are bidirectional, and therefore languages written in these scripts are also bidirectional:

Bidirectional Scripts

Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Thaana

The following languages are generally written in bidirectional scripts:

Bidirectional Languages

Adighe, Algerian Tribal, Arabic, Avesta, Baluchi, Berber, Dargwa, Farsi/Persian, Hausa, Hebrew, Ingush, Jawi/Javanese Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish (Sorani), Kök Turki, Ladino, Landha, Maldivian, Manchu, Middle Mongolian, Morrocan Arabic, old Malay, Pashto, Persian, Sindhi, Sogdian, South Arabic, Swahili, Syriac, Tajik. Thaana, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek, Yiddish.

Note that this list, of necessity, is not complete. There are too many languages in existence to identify them all here.

Languages that are not bidirectional

Languages written in Latin, Slavic, Cyrillic, (Modern) Greek and Thai scripts are left-to-right.

Ideographic languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are more flexible in their writing direction. They are generally written left-to-right, or vertically top-to-bottom (with the vertical lines proceeding from right to left). However, they are occasionally written right to left. (In actual fact, they are written vertically top-to-bottom in lengths of a single character, and therefore appear to be written as right-to-left.) Chinese newspapers sometimes combine all of these writing directions on a page. Fortunately for web designers and authors, the decision of writing ideographic languages left-to-right or top-to-bottom is up to the designer or author.

A good resource for information about languages is the SIL Ethnologue.

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"Which languages are right-to-left?" is a common question, although incorrectly phrased. Knowing the directionality of languages is important to web designers and authors, because the so called right-to-left languages are more complicated (for beginners) to work with and the organization and directionality of the page layout are affected. Therefore, knowing the writing direction can be relevant to estimating the work involved to create web pages in a new language.

Why is the question incorrectly phrased? There are 2 inaccuracies within this question. First, languages don't have a writing direction, the script used to write them determines the direction. For example, Yiddish is generally written in the Hebrew script, which is right-to-left. But it can also be written using the Latin script which is left-to-right. Many languages can be written in more than one script.

The second inaccuracy concerns the use of the term "right-to-left". Although the majority of the text will be written right-to-left, numbers are still written left-to-right (LTR). In addition, right-to-left text will often include borrowed or foreign words written in their native left-to-right script, and so the text is mixed directionality. The proper term therefore is "bidirectional", often shortened to "bidi". However, "right-to-left" is very commonly used, and for reasons of symmetry is the natural antonym to "left-to-right". "Bidirectional" is to be preferred.

There is more information on the different directionalities of scripts in: http://www.unicode.org/faq/middleeast.html.

There is more information on bidirectional languages, at:

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/bidi/index.jsp
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/dev/Mideast.mspx

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Questions & Answers: Which languages are right-to-left (RTL)?

Question

Answer

Bidirectional Scripts

Bidirectional Languages

Languages that are not bidirectional

By the way

Background

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