language-and-multilingual-typography

name	language-and-multilingual-typography
description	Use when shipping content in multiple languages. Languages have different typographic conventions; account for them.

Language and Multilingual Typography

Different languages have different typographic conventions: word spacing, hyphen rules, quotation marks. Don't ship English-only and translate later — design for multilingual from the start.

Per-language conventions

Language	Quotation marks	Note
English	'curly' or 'single'	Em-dash em-dash
French	« guillemets »	Non-breaking space before some punctuation
German	„Anführungszeichen'	Compound words long
Spanish	« comillas » or 'comillas'	inverted ¿ and ¡
Japanese	「角括弧」	Different glyphs, taller line-height needed
Portuguese (BR)	'aspas'	Similar to Spanish
Italian	« virgolette »	Similar to French

CSS for multilingual

Use the :lang() selector:

:lang(fr) { quotes: '« ' ' »'; }
:lang(de) { quotes: '„' ''' '‚' '''; }
:lang(en) { quotes: ''' ''' ''' '''; }
q::before { content: open-quote; }
q::after { content: close-quote; }

Font support

Verify font supports all target languages:

• Latin extended (most fonts)
• Cyrillic, Greek (some fonts)
• CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean — usually different font family)
• Arabic, Hebrew (RTL languages — special considerations)

Fraunces + Inter Tight cover Latin; need different fonts for CJK.

Where this fits in the X3 empire

Used in X3 Global-First localization (EN/ES/FR/DE/IT/JA/PT-BR).