The language statement is used to describe the human language used in the MIF file. This statement is optional and appears before the start component statement.

The syntax for the statement is:

language = "language string"

language string is a text string that identifies the language, dialect (as territory), and character encoding.

The format of language string is:

language-code|territory-code|encoding

language-code is a two-letter code defined in ISO 639, territory-code is a two-letter code defined in ISO 3166, and encoding is either iso8859-1 or unicode.

For example, the language string "fr|CA|iso8859-1" indicates French Canadian, with ISO 8859-1 (8-bit) encoding.

If any fields are not supplied, they are omitted, but the two vertical bars must appear in the string. The default language string is "en|US|iso8859-1".

The encoding field is ignored in the MIF file because the first two bytes of the file determine the encoding. However, the field is used when communicating through the Management Interface (MI).

The language statement can appear only once in the MIF file.

If you translate a MIF file into a local language, translate only literal strings such as names, descriptions, enumeration literals, and any comments in the MIF. Do not translate class strings, language names, or keywords.

Note: The service layer supplied with the SystemView Agent does not support Unicode and generates an error if it encounters a Unicode MIF.