Scottish English (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
Lars Aronsson
lars at aronsson.se
Mon Aug 27 01:27:58 CEST 2007
Somewhere in this thread, it was mentioned:
> en-GB - British English
> en-US - US English
Since GB is the ISO 3166-1 code for the United Kingdom, has it
occurred that the ISO 3166-2 code GB-EDH (for Edinburgh) might be
applicable? I didn't see this mentioned so far, but I could have
missed it.
For an overview, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GB
I realize there are problems with the hyphen and also with EDH
being shorter than four characters. It is also true that dialects
don't strictly follow administrative subdivisions. But when it
comes to regional subdivisions of countries, the job is already
done in ISO 3166-2 and doing it all over again seems unnecessary.
It might seem urgent to find a code for a Scottish English edition
of a film. But at the same time, a single such case is not really
a stable foundation for standardization. Will the defined subtag
be useful outside of this single sample? Aren't there any archives
with thousands of British dialect recordings that are in need of
subtags? If you have a thousand samples, how do you cluster them
into dialects? Wikipedia talks of Highland English and Glasgow
patter, which are two variants of Scottish English, both different
from the variant spoken in Edinburgh. So should en-scotland cover
all three?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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