Comments for region splits (was: Re: NEW-MODIFY LANGUAGE SUBTAGMODIFICATION for "GB")

[Kent Karlsson]

> > sv-SE (official) and sv-AX are so close that I cannot tell the
...
> What this really shows is that region subtags are not a perfect
> indicator of linguistic varieties, which we know -- but no superior,
> widely understood alternative system is known to exist.

Indeed. B.t.w. linguists claim there are 300-500 dialects of Swedish.
(And they claim, on a web site, to offer small sample recordings
of 100 of them. Unfortunately, in the samples I listened to, people
seem to *try* to speak (near) official Swedish, not really using the
dialects. That was a pity, I think.)

> I'm still not really sure what the argument is.  Is it simply that the
> comment is unnecessary, or that it might open a floodgate?

It seems a bit unnecessary, given that there are more urgent things, IMHO,
to comment about. E.g., macro-languages, other "larger" mergers/splits
than this one (after RFC 1766), dialects (no, I'm NOT going to suggest
registering hundreds of sv dialect variants), and historic orthographic
differences (but within, say, the last 100 years or so).

		/kent k