I'm taking my first stab at making a global parameter, through which I'd like to set font attributes for character sets of different languages. I'm using TEI-P5 with XSL 2, and I want my parameter to work with xml:lang.

It tried writing this way:

<xsl:template name="languageWrap">
   <xsl:param name="contents">
     <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </xsl:param>

I am not sure I understand what you want to achieve without seeing the input XML and the output you want to create but your text above says "making a global" parameter while here you are defining a parameter that is local to your template named "languageWrap".

A global parameter is defined as a child of the xsl:stylesheet element, not inside of a template, and is used to allow to pass in a value to the transformation that can be changed each time the transformation is run.

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