API Reference / API Parameters / queryLanguages
Feb. 26, 2019

queryLanguages

Type: list of strings
Engine default: []
Formerly: expectedLanguages
Parameter syntax
'queryLanguages' => ['language ISO code', ...]

Can be used in these methods:

About this parameter

Sets the languages to be used by language-specific settings and functionalities such as ignorePlurals, removeStopWords, and CJK word-detection.

queryLanguages performs 2 roles:

  • It sets a default list of languages used by removeStopWords and ignorePlurals (if they are enabled). For example, if you enable ignorePlurals, the languages set in queryLanguages will be applied.

  • It sets the dictionary for word-detecting in CJK languages (=Chinese “zh”, Japanese “ja”, or Korean “ko”). For this, you need to place the CJK language first in queryLanguages’s list of languages. For example, to ensure that Chinese word-recognition is based on a Chinese dictionary, and not the general algorithm used for all languages, you need to place Chinese in the first position of the list of languages. Likewise for Japanese and Korean, they need to be first in the list to ensure proper dictionary-based parsing. See example below.

Usage notes:

  • If you do not use queryLanguages, the engine will use either the system default (all languages) or the list of languages specified directly in ignorePlurals and removeStopWords.

  • As already noted, queryLanguages creates a default list of languages. This default that can be overridden by any setting that uses the default. For example, if you set the default to English and French, you can set ignorePlurals to use the default but set removeStopWords to recognize only English stop words. See example below.

  • For optimum relevance, it is recommended to only enable languages that are used in your data.

  • List of supported languages with their associated language ISO code:

    Afrikaans=af
    Arabic=ar
    Azerbaijani=az
    Bulgarian=bg
    Bengali=bn
    Catalan=ca
    Czech=cs
    Welsh=cy
    Danish=da
    German=de
    Greek=el
    English=en
    Esperanto=eo
    Spanish=es
    Estonian=et
    Basque=eu
    Persian (Farsi)=fa
    Finnish=fi
    Faroese=fo
    French=fr
    Irish=ga
    Galician=gl
    Hebrew=he
    Hindi=hi
    Hungarian=hu
    Armenian=hy
    Indonesian=id
    Icelandic=is
    Italian=it
    Japanese=ja
    Georgian=ka
    Kazakh=kk
    Korean=ko
    Kurdish=ku
    Kirghiz=ky
    Lithuanian=lt
    Latvian=lv
    Maori=mi
    Mongolian=mn
    Marathi=mr
    Malay=ms
    Maltese=mt
    Norwegian Bokmål=nb
    Dutch=nl
    Norwegian=no
    Northern Sotho=ns
    Polish=pl
    Pashto=ps
    Portuguese=pt
    Brazilian=pt-br
    Quechua=qu
    Romanian=ro
    Russian=ru
    Slovak=sk
    Albanian=sq
    Swedish=sv
    Swahili=sw
    Tamil=ta
    Telugu=te
    Thai=th
    Tagalog=tl
    Tswana=tn
    Turkish=tr
    Tatar=tt
    Ukranian=uk
    Urdu=ur
    Uzbek=uz
    Chinese=zh

Examples

Set the default Query Languages

In this example, we set Spanish (‘es’) as the default language for both ignorePlurals and removeStopWords

1
2
3
4
5
$index->setSettings([
  'queryLanguages' => ['es'],
  'removeStopWords' => true,
  'ignorePlurals' => true
]);

Override Query Languages

In this example, we override the Spanish default for removeStopWords by adding Catalan (‘ca’) to its list of languages.

1
2
3
$results = $index->search('query', [
  'removeStopWords' => ['ca', 'es']
]);

Set the correct dictionary for word detection

By placing ‘ja’ in the first position, this ensures that the Japanese dictionary will be used whenever the engine detects CJK logograms.

1
2
3
$results = $index->search('query', [
  'queryLanguages' => ['ja', 'en']
]);

Did you find this page helpful?