This template formats a linguistic interlinear glossed text:

{{interlinear|Nginda-rni ngaja-mi jurliji-rdarra diyim ka-rdu|DEM(M)-FOC see-IRR bird-PL fly 3SG-go|'Look at all the birds flying!'}}

Important: On lines to be interlinearised, any wiki markup or templates should never span word boundaries. Мarkup or templates that apply to a sequence of words must be repeated for each word: (It is also possible to apply formatting to an entire line, see below)

{{interlinear|Te ni-ke'''koo''' '''te̱e''' '''ún'''|And past-arrived.PL man he|"The men arrived"}}

The characters <, > and = should not be used directly. They can be substituted as follows:

To let a multi-word expression be treated as a single word, surround it in {curly brackets}. Similarly, use {} for an empty word:[1]

{{interlinear|Dit is een voorbeeldje in het Nederlands|This is a {little example} in {} Dutch.|}}

The template can be invoked with any number of unnamed parameters, which are interpreted as lines of text. If there is only one unnamed parameter, then it will be rendered in-line and treated as a gloss line: {{interlinear|house-ATTR master-ABS}} gives: house-ATTR master-ABS. If they are more than one, then all will be interlinearised except the last one, which is assumed to be the free translation. To force the interlinearisation of all lines, supply an empty last unnamed parameter:

{{interlinear|Ù-dììny 	Juáàny 	bèʔcw.|COMPL-hit 	Juan 	dog|}}