80+ Language Map Labels

Switch label language at runtime with one MapLibre expression. No tile rebuild.

How it works

Every place / road / POI in our tiles carries up to ~80 localized name attributes:

• name — primary (local language as tagged in OSM)
• name:latin — universal romanized fallback
• name:de, name:fr, name:ja, … — per-language

The expression below picks the requested language, falls back to romanized, then to local.

Apply

function setLang(map, lang) {
  ['place_label', 'transportation_name', 'poi_label'].forEach(layer => {
    map.setLayoutProperty(layer, 'text-field', [
      'coalesce',
      ['get', `name:${lang}`],
      ['get', 'name:latin'],
      ['get', 'name']
    ]);
  });
}
setLang(map, 'de');

Supported codes

Full set (BCP-47 language tags). All present on tiles built v2 onwards.

Group	Codes
Western European	en, de, fr, es, pt, pt-BR, it, nl, nl-BE, ca, gl, eu, ga, cy, gd, oc
Nordic	sv, da, no, nb, nn, fi, is, fo, se
Central European	pl, cs, sk, hu, ro, sl, hr, bs, sr, sr-Latn, mk, sq
Eastern European	ru, uk, be, lt, lv, et
Balkans / Greek	bg, el
Turkic / Caucasian	tr, az, kk, ky, uz, tk, hy, ka, ce
Middle East	ar, fa, ps, he, ku, ckb
South Asian	hi, bn, ur, pa, gu, ta, te, kn, ml, mr, si, ne
East Asian	zh, zh-Hans, zh-Hant, zh-HK, zh-TW, ja, ko
Southeast Asian	th, vi, id, ms, tl, km, lo, my
African	am, sw, af, zu, xh, st, tn, ts, ss, ve, nr, ha, yo, ig, so, om
Universal fallback	name:latin (always present), name:nonlatin

If a place has no name in the requested language, MapLibre's coalesce falls back to name:latin, then to name. Result: never blank.

RTL languages

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian render right-to-left correctly. Enable the optional RTL plugin once, before creating the map:

maplibregl.setRTLTextPlugin(
  'https://unpkg.com/@mapbox/mapbox-gl-rtl-text@0.2.3/mapbox-gl-rtl-text.min.js',
  null,
  true
);

CJK / vertical scripts

Japanese / Chinese / Korean render horizontally by default. Vertical text is not supported by MapLibre.

Mixed language UI

Common pattern: switch map language to match the user's UI locale.

map.on('styledata', () => setLang(map, document.documentElement.lang));

Server-side

If you serve styles from your own server, bake the language into the style for delivery to MapLibre clients that can't run the expression switch (rare):

function styleForLanguage(baseStyle, lang) {
  const out = structuredClone(baseStyle);
  for (const layer of out.layers) {
    if (layer.layout?.['text-field']) {
      layer.layout['text-field'] = [
        'coalesce',
        ['get', `name:${lang}`],
        ['get', 'name:latin'],
        ['get', 'name']
      ];
    }
  }
  return out;
}

Coverage

Coverage of each language varies by region — name:de exists for most German place names but only some Swahili, etc. The fallback chain handles this transparently.