Can the fallback language be different for different sites on a Sitecore instance?

Question

In Sitecore, I want to set different fallback language for different sites.

For example,

• On Site 1: The Languages fr-fr, de-de, da-dk, es-es, pt-pt should fallback to EN-GB.

• On Site 2: The language fr-fr, de-de, da-dk, es-es, pt-pt should fallback to EN instead.

So, fr-fr should fallback to en-GB for Site 1 and fr-fr should fallback to EN for Site 2.

Please let me know if this is possible and if yes how? If there are customizations that are required to implement this, is it suggested to have such implementation?

Answer 1

You can enable the language fallback functionality either on item-level or field-level on the relevant sites and on the relevant items, fields, or templates.

The fallback language specified on a language definition item (located in sitecore/system/Languages) applies to all the fields and items across all sites configured on the same Sitecore instance that have language fallback enabled.

You can also set up a chain of language fallbacks. For example, you can specify the language fr-FR to fall back to en-GB and en-GB to fall back to en. If the version in en-GB does not exist for a particular item, then the version in fr-FR falls back to the version in en. Hopefully, this built-in logic will work for your case.

Otherwise, you will need to add a custom language to Sitecore, i.e. your own French one to support the language uniqueness to configure the language fallback at a site level.