Serbian country codes
Doug Ewell
dewell at adelphia.net
Tue Jun 6 08:04:28 CEST 2006
As most list members probably know, Montenegro voted two weeks ago to
leave the confederation of Serbia and Montenegro (our dear friend "CS")
and declared its independence. More recently, Serbia completed the
circle by declaring independence from Montenegro on June 5.
While there is no official statement yet on the ISO 3166/MA Web site, it
is widely expected [citation needed] that the MA will withdraw the
controversial alpha-2 code element CS and assign two new code elements
for the two new countries. Of course, this would affect the Language
Subtag Registry by causing the region subtag CS to be deprecated and two
new subtags to be added.
There is an article on Wikipedia titled "Serbian country codes" which
gives one Belgrade resident's take on the matter. The following passage
may be of interest, especially the last paragraph, which would
constitute a mistake orders of magnitude greater than the reuse of CS.
--- begin quote ---
Two-letter ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2
This code, used also as Internet TLD, is the major problem with ISO
assignment to Serbia. All combinations of S as a first letter and any
other letter in word Serbia, or even Srbija (in Serbian), are already
taken by other states:
Country names Alpha-2
------------- -------
Saudi Arabia SA
Slovenia SI
Solomon Islands SB
Suriname SR
Svalbard and Jan Mayen SJ
Sweden SE
There have been unofficial suggestions that Alpha-2 code for Serbia
should be RS (Republic of Serbia), which is unlikely, as no country has
its form of government in these codes. Other solutions could be
"generic" SS or SX, although SS is to be avoided for its association
with Nazi Schutzstaffel.
As this code is also to be used as Internet top-level domain for the
country, there have been rumors of approaching either International
Organization for Standardization, United Nations or one of the countries
in the list in order to switch the codes. Likely options would be SB
(Solomon Islands) and SJ (Svalbard and Jan Mayen).
--- end quote ---
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
More information about the Ietf-languages
mailing list