Language
Supported language codes for localizing TMDB responses.
The language option sets the default language for all API responses — including titles, overviews,
taglines, and biographical data. TMDB accepts two formats:
- Primary translation codes — locale-specific tags in
language-REGIONformat (e.g.,"it-IT","en-US","pt-BR") - ISO 639-1 codes — bare two-letter language codes (e.g.,
"it","en","fr")
const tmdb = new TMDB(apiKey, { language: "it-IT" });When no language is set, TMDB defaults to English.
Primary Translation Codes
These are the fully-supported locales that TMDB has dedicated translation support for. Prefer these over bare ISO 639-1 codes when you need consistent, high-quality translations.
| Code | Language / Region |
|---|---|
en-US | English (United States) |
en-GB | English (United Kingdom) |
en-AU | English (Australia) |
en-CA | English (Canada) |
it-IT | Italian (Italy) |
fr-FR | French (France) |
fr-CA | French (Canada) |
de-DE | German (Germany) |
de-AT | German (Austria) |
de-CH | German (Switzerland) |
es-ES | Spanish (Spain) |
es-MX | Spanish (Mexico) |
pt-PT | Portuguese (Portugal) |
pt-BR | Portuguese (Brazil) |
ja-JP | Japanese (Japan) |
ko-KR | Korean (South Korea) |
zh-CN | Chinese Simplified (China) |
zh-TW | Chinese Traditional (Taiwan) |
zh-HK | Chinese Traditional (Hong Kong) |
ru-RU | Russian (Russia) |
ar-SA | Arabic (Saudi Arabia) |
ar-AE | Arabic (UAE) |
hi-IN | Hindi (India) |
tr-TR | Turkish (Turkey) |
nl-NL | Dutch (Netherlands) |
pl-PL | Polish (Poland) |
sv-SE | Swedish (Sweden) |
| ... | and more |
The full
PrimaryTranslationstype contains ~80 supported locale codes. See thePrimaryTranslationstype in the package for the exhaustive list.
ISO 639-1 Codes
Bare ISO 639-1 codes (e.g., "en", "it", "fr") are also accepted via the LanguageISO6391 type.
These may return less complete translations compared to primary locale codes.
Use them only when a primary translation code is not available for your target language.