Right-to-Left Support

Foundation can easily adapt its components to work with languages that read from right to left.

HTML

You'll need to make a few changes to your markup to get the Javascript components working nice and smooth. In the <html> tag, you'll need to add a dir attribute with a value of rtl. Here's what your <html> tag should look like:

<!-- This example is for a right-to-left Arabic layout -->
<html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl">

Language Code

You'll need to change your lang attribute value to match your language. Here's a handy list of common right-to-left languages and their html codes.

  • Arabic: ar
  • Chinese: zh
  • Farsi: fa
  • Hebrew: he, iw
  • Japanese: ja
  • Urdu: ur
  • Yiddish: yi, ji

View of a full list of language codes on the website of the Library of Congress.


CSS Download

If you use a CSS version of Foundation (the ones you can find on the download page), you'll need to create a custom download that includes RTL CSS instead of LTR. Just select "Right-to-left" under the Text Direction section of the customizer.


Sass Configuration

If you're using the Sass version of Foundation, open your project's settings file (settings.scss) and change this variable in the Global section:

$global-text-direction: rtl;

This will convert the framework's components to RTL format.