Intl.Locale.prototype.variants

Description

Variants are a part of the main language ID. They select variants of a language that the (language, region, script) triple cannot differentiate. Usually, they represent the same language in different eras or different orthographies. For example, German has the 1901 and 1996 orthography variants, which are written as de-1901 and de-1996; the "Early Modern English (1500-1700)" variant is written as en-emodeng. The subtag can contain multiple identifiers separated by dashes (-). These identifiers are technically unordered, although in practice they often have a semantic hierarchy—for example, the Resian dialect of Slovenian is written as sl-rozaj, and the San Giorgio/Bila dialect of Resian is written as sl-rozaj-biske.

The variants property's value is set at construction time, either through the part of the locale identifier after region or through the variants option of the Intl.Locale() constructor. The latter takes priority if they are both present; and if neither is present, the property has value undefined.

The set accessor of variants is undefined. You cannot change this property directly.

Examples

Like other locale subtags, the variants can be added to the Intl.Locale object via the locale string, or a configuration object argument to the constructor.

Adding variants via the locale string

The variants, if present, are the last parts of a valid Unicode language identifier string, and can be added to the initial locale identifier string that is passed into the Intl.Locale() constructor. Note that the variants are not a required part of a locale identifier.

const locale = new Intl.Locale("sl-rozaj-biske");
console.log(locale.variants); // "rozaj-biske"

Adding variants via the configuration object argument

The Intl.Locale() constructor has an optional configuration object argument. Set the variants property of the configuration object to your desired variants, and then pass it into the constructor.

const locale = new Intl.Locale("sl", { variants: "rozaj-biske" });
console.log(locale.variants); // "rozaj-biske"

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Intl.Locale
• Unicode variant subtag in the Unicode locale data markup language spec
• IANA language subtag registry