I have a website, say, https://example.com, that runs on LAMP stack (Apache2 rewrite_mod activated) and that I would like to make multilingual.

I don’t want my URLs to contain the language/locale, though — I want to only keep them in the $_GET array. So, when clicking a link with the address https://example.com/dev/en, I want to see https://example.com/dev/ in the address bar and [lang] => en in the $_GET array.

Is there a way to do this (with Apache RewriteRules or whatever)?

Here’s how far I’ve got:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^dev/(w+)$ dev?lang=$1

This does rewrite the /en but keeps the parameter in the address bar which I don’t want.