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Babel

The multilingual framework to localize LaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX

What’s new in babel 26.9

2026-06-14

⚠ Due to a recent update in the LaTeX kernel, the behavior of tabular has changed, which may affect the order of columns. This issue is expected to be resolved within one to two months. Apologies for the (temporary) inconvenience.

Metadata

Babel now supports the other-languages key in \DocumentMetadata. It also recognizes language as a synonym for lang, which has been available since Babel version 25.8 (2025-04-29).

The basic idea of other-languages is the same: you can load the secondary languages with the corresponding BCP 47 tags. Basically, what other-languages does is to convert something like:

\DocumentMetadata{language=hi, other-languages={ro-MD, fr, ar-DZ}}
...
\usepackage[english]{babel}

to

\DocumentMetadata{language=hi, other-languages={ro-MD, fr, ar-DZ}}
...
\usepackage[main=hindi, moldavian, french, arabic-algeria, english, hindi]{babel}

Note the order with other-languages, which precede languages declared explicitly in \usepackage.

The basic tag lookup explained in the babel manual is applied here, so that fr-Latn-FR is valid and mapped to fr, which is in turn mapped to french, while en-Latn-US is mapped to en-US, which is mapped to american. This eases the localization of automatically generated documents.

Remember you can also use lazy loading for secondary languages.

Improved Breton

There is a new ldf file for Breton, revised by Jacques André. The corresponding caption names in theini file have been modified accordingly.

Fixes