Lang
Lang Lang (born 14 June 1982) is a Chinese concert pianist recognized for his prodigious technique, extensive global performances, and initiatives to promote classical music education.[1] Beginning piano at age three and entering Beijing's Central Music Conservatory at nine, he secured first prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians at thirteen and achieved international breakthrough at seventeen by substituting at the 2001 Ravinia Festival.[2][2] His career highlights include appearances at the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, performances for Pope Francis in 2016 and multiple U.S. presidents, and designation as a UN Messenger of Peace in 2013, alongside honors such as Germany's Order of Merit.[2] In 2008, he established the Lang Lang International Music Foundation to advance music education for children, emphasizing accessibility and innovation in teaching methods.[2] Despite widespread acclaim for expanding classical music's audience, particularly among youth, Lang Lang has drawn criticism from traditionalists in the piano world for interpretive choices involving heavy rubato, exaggerated physical mannerisms, and recomposition-like freedoms that some view as prioritizing spectacle over composer intent.[3][4]Surname
Etymology and distribution
The surname Lang primarily originates from Germanic languages, where it derives from the Old High German word lang, meaning "long" or "tall," serving as a descriptive nickname for an individual of above-average height.[5] This etymology traces back to early medieval records, including Old English charters from 972 A.D. referencing figures like "Aetheric thes langa."[6] The name spread through Anglo-Saxon, Scottish, and continental European contexts, with variants such as Lange (common in northern Germany and Scandinavia) and Long (in English-speaking regions) reflecting similar descriptive roots.[7] In Ashkenazic Jewish communities, it adopted the same nickname origin, often among families from German-speaking areas.[8] A distinct Hungarian variant, Láng, stems from the word for "flame," likely denoting a nickname for someone with a fiery temperament or red hair, though this is less common in the anglicized Lang spelling.[7] Separately, in East Asian contexts, Lang romanizes the Chinese surname 郎 (Láng), historically tied to an imperial title for a court minister or son-in-law, originating from ancient states like Lu during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 B.C.).[9] This Chinese form is unrelated to the Germanic etymology but contributes significantly to global counts due to phonetic transliteration in Pinyin.[10] Globally, the surname Lang is held by approximately 753,061 people across 178 countries, ranking as the 718th most common surname worldwide.[11] Its distribution reflects these dual origins: in China, it predominates with 390,807 bearers (primarily the native 郎 surname, concentrated in provinces like Guangdong and Fujian), accounting for over half of occurrences.[11] [10] Among European and diaspora populations, it is most frequent in Germany (113,096), the United States (83,849, mainly of German, Scottish, or English descent), Austria (16,115), and France (11,055, especially in Alsace-Lorraine).[11] [9] Significant presences also exist in Canada (11,020), Australia (9,911), Vietnam (30,473, via localized adoptions), and Scandinavian countries like Sweden.[11] In the U.S., census data from the 19th and 20th centuries show concentrations in states with heavy German immigration, such as Pennsylvania and the Midwest, with 81% of bearers identifying as White in recent genetic ancestry surveys.[8] Highest density occurs in small nations like the Marshall Islands, likely due to migration patterns.[11]| Top Countries by Incidence | Bearers |
|---|---|
| China | 390,807[11] |
| Germany | 113,096[11] |
| United States | 83,849[11] |
| Vietnam | 30,473[11] |
| Austria | 16,115[11] |
Notable individuals
Fritz Lang (1890–1976) was an Austrian-born filmmaker renowned for his contributions to German Expressionism and film noir, including directing the science fiction classic Metropolis (1927). Born in Vienna to a construction company manager father and a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism, Lang's early career involved working as an actor and screenwriter before transitioning to directing in Germany.[12][5] k.d. lang, born Kathryn Dawn Lang on November 2, 1961, in Alberta, Canada, is a singer-songwriter who rose to prominence blending country, pop, and torch song styles, earning four Grammy Awards and eight Juno Awards. Growing up in the small town of Consort, she began performing in the early 1980s with a distinctive androgynous stage persona and vocal timbre influenced by classic torch singers.[13][14] Lang Lang, born June 14, 1982, in Shenyang, China, is a virtuoso pianist who began lessons at age three and gave his first public recital before age five. He gained international fame as a teenager after performing at the 1999 Gala Concert for the BBC Proms and has since collaborated with major orchestras worldwide, founding the Lang Lang International Music Foundation to promote music education.[2][15] Stephen Lang, born July 11, 1952, in New York City to a philanthropist father of Hungarian Jewish descent and an Irish-German Catholic mother, is an American actor known for roles in theater, film, and television, including Colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar (2009). A graduate of Swarthmore College, Lang has earned acclaim for Broadway performances and screen work spanning decades.[16]Places
Settlements and administrative divisions
Lang is a municipality in the Leibnitz District of Styria, Austria, classified as an Ortsgemeinde with historical roots traceable to Roman-era settlements in the region. The area features archaeological evidence of pre-Roman occupation, underscoring its long-standing role as a rural administrative unit in southern Styria.[17] In Canada, Lang functions as a village within the Rural Municipality of Scott No. 98, Saskatchewan, positioned approximately 70 kilometers south of Regina along Highway 39.[18] This administrative entity supports local community facilities, including a village office, rink, and hall, typical of small prairie settlements focused on agriculture and basic municipal services.[18] Other minor settlements named Lang exist globally, including locales in Australia such as Lang Lang in Victoria, though these are less prominent administrative divisions compared to the Austrian and Canadian examples. Comprehensive geographic databases indicate at least 16 such places across 12 countries, often as small hamlets or townships without higher-level administrative status.[19]Natural features
The Lang Glacier (Langgletscher), located in the Lötschental valley of the Bernese Alps in Switzerland's Valais canton, is a valley glacier descending from the Lötschenlücke pass at approximately 3,158 meters elevation into the lower valley.[20] It forms part of the glacier forefield accessible via themed nature trails, showcasing retreat patterns due to climatic changes, with comparative imagery documenting its extent from historical surveys.[21] Nearby, the adjacent Anen Glacier shares similar access from huts like Anenhütte, offering views of seracs and crevasses for guided explorations.[22] In Norway, the Lang Mountains (Langfjellene) constitute a broad mountainous region in southern Norway, extending from the Dovrefjell southward to the Setesdal highlands, encompassing varied terrain shaped by Caledonian orogeny geological events.[23] This area includes prominent peaks and plateaus, contributing to the Scandinavian highlands' rugged topography. Canada features Lang Lake in Manitoba's Rural Municipality of St. Philips, a small lake at coordinates 51° 30′ 50″ N, 101° 31′ 8″ W, classified as a natural water body within the province's glacial till plains.[24] A separate Lang Lake exists in Ontario's Sudbury District, supporting recreational fisheries for species including lake trout, walleye, and pike amid the La Cloche Mountains.[25]Computing
Environment variables
TheLANG environment variable in POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Unix-like systems including Linux, specifies the default locale for applications, influencing language, regional conventions, and character encoding for internationalization and localization (i18n).[26] It sets the base category for locale-dependent behavior unless overridden by more specific variables, affecting output formats for dates, numbers, collation, and messages in programs.[27]
The value of LANG follows a conventional format of language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier], where language is a two-letter ISO 639 code (e.g., en for English), territory is an ISO 3166 two-letter country code (e.g., US), codeset specifies the character encoding (e.g., UTF-8), and optional modifiers handle variants like dialects.[28] For instance, LANG=en_US.UTF-8 configures English language with U.S. conventions and UTF-8 encoding, enabling programs to display localized strings and sort text accordingly.[29] If unset or empty, implementations default to the "C" or POSIX locale, which enforces portable, ASCII-based behavior without regional adaptations.[26]
LANG operates within a hierarchy of locale variables: it provides the fallback for unset LC_* categories (e.g., LC_MESSAGES for message language, LC_CTYPE for character classification), but LC_ALL overrides all, including LANG, for uniform settings across categories.[30] This precedence ensures LC_ALL=C forces the POSIX locale globally, useful for scripting reproducibility, while LANG allows category-specific overrides without affecting everything.[27] Programs query these via system calls like setlocale(LC_ALL, "") to adapt runtime behavior.[28]
In practice, LANG is set in shell profiles (e.g., ~/.bashrc or /etc/default/locale on Debian-based systems) or via commands like export LANG=en_US.[UTF-8](/page/UTF-8).[31] System-wide defaults vary; for example, many Linux distributions ship with LANG=C.[UTF-8](/page/UTF-8) for broader Unicode support over the stricter ASCII-only "C" locale.[29] Tools like locale command display effective settings, confirming LANG's influence.[26]
Disabling localization by settingbash# Example: Setting LANG for UTF-8 English export LANG=[en_US.UTF-8](/page/UTF-8) locale # Displays current locale categories derived from LANG# Example: Setting LANG for UTF-8 English export LANG=[en_US.UTF-8](/page/UTF-8) locale # Displays current locale categories derived from LANG
LANG=C ensures predictable output in build environments or when portability is prioritized over user preferences.[32]
Markup and web standards
Thelang attribute is a global attribute in HTML that specifies the primary human language of the content within an element, such as the entire document or a subsection, using IETF BCP 47 language tags (e.g., "en" for English or "fr-CA" for Canadian French). It enables user agents like browsers, screen readers, and search engines to process content appropriately, including for pronunciation rules, hyphenation, character mapping, and quotation marks.[33] The attribute is recommended on the root <html> element to declare the document's base language, with inheritance applying to child elements unless overridden.[34]
In XML-based markup languages, including XHTML, the equivalent is the xml:lang attribute, introduced in the XML 1.0 specification (February 10, 1998) as a namespace-independent attribute for indicating the natural language of an element's content and attributes.[35] XHTML documents, which are XML-serialized HTML, require xml:lang in the XML namespace for strict compliance, though HTML's lang can coexist; mismatches between the two may impair accessibility tools like screen readers that rely on consistent language cues.[36] Web standards emphasize using valid BCP 47 tags to avoid ambiguity, with tools validating against registries like IANA's language subtag registry.[37]
Adoption of the lang attribute traces to HTML 4.01 (December 1999), building on earlier internationalization efforts, and was formalized in HTML5 (October 28, 2014, with ongoing living standard updates) as essential for accessibility and rendering. Non-use or invalid values can hinder search engine optimization, as crawlers infer language for indexing, and accessibility, where assistive technologies fail to apply correct speech synthesis voices—studies show proper declaration improves screen reader performance by up to 20% in multilingual contexts.[38] Standards bodies like W3C mandate it in WCAG 2.1 (Success Criterion 3.1.1) at AA level for web content.