Language Identifier List Criteria

[Georg Schweizer]

Mark Davis wrote:

> You keep expressing this in a counterproductive way. The language tag
> 'de-AT' is reasonably defined: German as used in Austria.

Political borders don’t always run along language variations.
A language-region tag is generally understood as the current official 
standard of the language in the corresponding country.

The tag "de-AT" clearly does not mean *any* German as used in Austria, 
it refers to Austrian Standard German.

For example, in the context of a spell checking software you may expect 
the following:
- current official Austrian orthography ("neue amtliche 
Rechtschreibung"),
- as currently taught in Austrian schools,
- as defined in the Austrian Dictionary ("Österreichisches Wörterbuch"),
- common practice in Austrian newspapers,
- etc.

In my opinion the list should include only tags for which such distinct 
conventions exist (which is apparently not the case for de-LI).

Georg