hypothetical Cajun question

[John Cowan]

Sean M. Burke scripsit:

> Suppose (just hypothetically) that I want to tag some documents that are in 
> (Louisiana) Cajun French.  Not Louisiana French Creole (the other end of 
> the dialect continuum), but Cajun.
> A fairly obvious tag choice is "fr-us-la".
> 
> My question is: I don't think that that /has/ to be registered with 
> IANA.  But /can/ it be registered?

If you are claiming conformance to RFC 3066, the only kinds of
unregistered tags you can use are:

1)	ll (ISO 639)
2)	lll (ISO 639-2)
3)	ll-cc (ISO 639 + ISO 3166-1)
4)	lll-cc (ISO 639-2 + ISO 3166-1)
5)	x-anything (private use)

Every other kind of tag *must* be registered.

> I'm under the impression that besides establishing i-foo tags, the IANA 
> language tag registry also has some (possibly "secondary") role as a place 
> to say "among all the possible ways that you might imagine to express a 
> language tag for Cajun, this is the one that we think people should use."
> But I emphasize that this is just an impression on my part.

That is its primary role.  The i- tags are just fallbacks for situations
where there is no obvious ISO 639 tag to serve as primary.

> --
> Sean M. Burke    http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
> 
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-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_