[Waiting for user feedback] WPML language menu lang attribute doesn't match the default locale or hreflang, but the language co...

I think this is exactly what I need.

add_filter( 'icl_ls_languages', 'my_montenegrin' );
function my_montenegrin( $languages ) {
    foreach( $languages as &$language ) {
        if( $language['default_locale'] === 'sr_ME' ) {
            $language['language_code'] = 'sr';
            break;
        }
    } 
    return $languages;
}

But it doesn't work. Why?

The options that do work:

$language['url'] =
$language['native_name'] =

But not the language_code one.

Hi Bobby,

The problem is not with the lang attribute of the page or hreflang, both of which are correct, but with the separate lang attribute of the WPML language menu. This attribute, as far as I understand, corresponds to the language code, i.e. the two letters that indicate the language in the URL (these two letters are selected once and for all in the WPML settings, they cannot be changed, they can only be changed by creating a new language and deleting the old one). I need to change the lang attribute of the WPML language menu because Google, which didn't seem to pay attention to it before, now looks at it (for screen reader purposes) and reports an error (downgrading the page) if the code doesn't meet its specification. At the same time, the peculiarity of Montenegrin is that it is not considered a language according to the specifications used by Google (there is a separate issue behind this, indirectly related to the break-up of Yugoslavia). So I have to satisfy Google without changing the language name in the URLs. I see that the only way to satisfy Google is to assign this language to Serbian as its variant. This is what I did earlier with the lang attribute of pages in this language and the hreflang attribute. But I can't change the lang attribute of the WPML language menu because, as far as I know, it's not an independent attribute, but reproduces the language code (this situation, by the way, I consider a fundamental flaw, as Google now sees this attribute as equivalent to the lang attribute of the page and hreflang).

Bobby,

I don't want to change the language code. It's correct. Not only because there are already many links to pages with this code in the URL, but also because there is no other sensible two-character code for the Montenegrin language apart from the Serbian language code. However, Serbian is another language that I already use. This means that my site already has pages in Serbian (in its Cyrillic version; my Montenegrin is in Latin script). So no, it's not about changing the language code in the URL, it's just about changing (I'd even say 'replacing') the lang attribute (used exclusively by screen readers) in the WPML language menu. I literally need to replace two letters of that very lang attribute of the language menu with another two letters (more would be better, of course, because it's ideal to call this language 'sr-me', not 'sr', because sr is already used for another language, and I'm not sure Google would like that).

As for the change in Google's perception, in the same ticket, I shared links in private messages to the results of analysing pages through pagespeed, where it is clear that Google considers this to be an error (actually it is enough to run any page of my website in Montenegrin through pagespeed to see this error). And yes, Google didn't react to it before. It also did not react to the page's lang attribute and hreflang, which I had originally set to 'me' for Montenegrin, not 'sr-me' as it is now.