SpeechSynthesisUtterance: lang property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since September 2018.

The lang property of the SpeechSynthesisUtterance interface gets and sets the language of the utterance.

If unset, the app's (i.e., the <html> lang value) lang will be used, or the user-agent default if that is unset too.

Value

A string representing a BCP 47 language tag.

Examples

js
const synth = window.speechSynthesis;
const inputForm = document.querySelector("form");
const inputTxt = document.querySelector("input");
const voiceSelect = document.querySelector("select");
const voices = synth.getVoices();
// …
inputForm.onsubmit = (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();
  const utterThis = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(inputTxt.value);
  const selectedOption =
    voiceSelect.selectedOptions[0].getAttribute("data-name");
  for (const voice of voices) {
    if (voice.name === selectedOption) {
      utterThis.voice = voice;
    }
  }
  utterThis.lang = "en-US";
  synth.speak(utterThis);
  inputTxt.blur();
};

Specifications

Specification
Web Speech API
# dom-speechsynthesisutterance-lang

Browser compatibility

See also