You can "overwrite" a parent element's language declaration by introducing any element apart from applet
, base
, basefont
, br
, frame
, frameset
, hr
, iframe
, meta
, param
, script
(of HTML 4.0) with an own lang
attribute:
<p lang="en" title="An English paragraph">
<span lang="de" title="A German sentence">Hallo Welt!</span>
</p>