diff --git a/wp-includes/functions.php b/wp-includes/functions.php
index 1d348571c2..858a10cccd 100644
--- a/wp-includes/functions.php
+++ b/wp-includes/functions.php
@@ -1109,7 +1109,7 @@ function wp_die($message, $title = '') {
 
 ?>
 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php if ( function_exists('language_attributes') ) language_attributes(); ?>>
 <head>
 	<title><?php echo $title ?></title>
 	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
