Which languages and countries does the News API support?#

The APITube News API lets you filter articles across 59 languages and 178 countries. You narrow results by an article’s detected language with the language.code parameter (for example en), and by the publisher’s country with source.country.code (for example us). The full, authoritative code lists are published in the API reference — the list of languages and the list of countries.

Language codes follow the two-letter ISO 639-1 style (en, fr, de), and country codes follow the two-letter ISO 3166 style (us, gb, jp). Each filter accepts up to three codes at once, separated by commas, and returns articles matching any of them.

Which languages can you filter by?#

APITube recognizes 59 languages you can pass to language.code, plus an un value that stands for undetected or unknown content. The language APITube detects on each article at processing time is what you filter against. To fetch only English articles:

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?language.code=en&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

Pass several codes to widen the net — up to three, comma-separated, matched with OR:

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?language.code=en,fr,de&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

A few rules to know. A code must be one or two characters, or the request returns 400 ER0061. An unrecognized code returns 400 ER0237 (“language with code not found”), so check spelling against the list of languages. One quirk: language.code=us is treated as en. For the full mechanics, see how to filter news by language.

Which countries can you filter by?#

source.country.code covers 178 countries and filters by the country of the news source — where the publisher is based — using a two-letter code. To get articles from United States sources:

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?source.country.code=us&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

Like language, it accepts up to three codes, comma-separated and OR-matched, for example source.country.code=us,gb,ca. Each code must be exactly two characters (else 400 ER0246), and an unknown code returns 400 ER0212. Because this parameter is about the publisher, not the story’s subject, it answers “which country’s outlets ran this?” rather than “where did this happen?”. To target where an event took place, use the location filters covered in how to filter news by country and location.

How do you combine language and country?#

The two filters stack, so you can pin both the language and the source country in one request. This returns English-language articles from United States and United Kingdom sources:

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?language.code=en&source.country.code=us,gb&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

Within a single filter the codes are OR-matched (any of the listed languages, any of the listed countries); across the two filters they are combined with AND (the language and the country must both match). You can layer any other filter on top — a title search, a date range, or a category — because language and country are part of the shared filter chain. You can send the key as the api_key query parameter or as an X-API-Key header.

How do you exclude a language or country?#

To remove specific languages or countries instead of selecting them, use the ignore. variants. ignore.language.code drops articles in the listed languages, and ignore.source.country.code drops articles from the listed source countries — each accepting up to three comma-separated codes:

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?ignore.language.code=fr&ignore.source.country.code=gb&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

Common Questions#

• How many languages and countries are supported?
• What does language.code=us do?
• Does source.country.code mean where the news happened?
• Are all languages and countries covered equally?

How many languages and countries are supported?#

The language.code filter supports 59 languages (plus an un value for undetected content), and source.country.code supports 178 countries. These come straight from the API reference lists, which are the authoritative source: the list of languages and the list of countries. If a code is not on those lists, the API rejects it.

What does language.code=us do?#

us is not a language, but the API maps language.code=us to en (English) as a convenience. If you meant to filter by United States sources, use source.country.code=us instead — that is the country filter, while language.code is only about the article’s language.

Does source.country.code mean where the news happened?#

No. source.country.code filters by the country of the publisher that ran the article, not the location the story is about. A US outlet reporting on an event in Japan is a source.country.code=us article. To filter by the geographic location of the story, use the location filters described in how to filter news by country and location.

Are all languages and countries covered equally?#

The code lists tell you what you can filter by, not how many articles exist for each value. Article volume varies by language and country — high-output languages and countries return far more results than niche ones. If a specific language.code or source.country.code returns few articles, the code is valid but coverage for that value is simply thinner. Learn how the pipeline gathers articles in how APITube collects and processes news.