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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