Valencian registration (Was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM

[Addison Phillips]

+1

Addison

John Cowan wrote:
> Addison Phillips scripsit:
> 
>> In other words, if you make the Description 'Valencia' (the place), it 
>> will be more accurate. Then "ca-valencia" would mean roughly "Valencian 
>> as spoken in Valencia". Just because its a subtag of type "variant" 
>> doesn't mean that the defined meaning isn't regional or geographic in 
>> nature.
> 
> The story I've been able to pull together seems to be this:
> 
> 0) Catalan, like a lot of languages, has a bunch of dialects and a
> standard variety which is a dialectal compromise; it's closest to the
> Central dialect spoken in and near Barcelona.
> 
> 1) There is definitely a special variety of Catalan spoken in Valencia,
> and it's plausible to call it Valencian.  It has sub-varieties.
> 
> 2) The Valencian Academy of Language (Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua)
> says Valencian is a dialect of Catalan, but is standardized separately
> from Standard Catalan.  The standardized varieties are different but
> are fully mutually intelligible.
> 
> 3) Some members of the Academy think the names "Valencian" and "Catalan"
> are synonyms.  (So does ISO 639-2.)
> 
> 4) Some people, not members of the Academy, think Valencian is different
> enough from other Catalan varieties to count as a separate language.
> 
> So I suggest the Description be "Varieties spoken in Valencia, including
> Standard Valencian."
> 
> 
> A general point:  Descriptions are going to be more verbose for variant
> subtags than for other kinds of subtags, which are in the end defined
> by encyclopedic descriptions at Ethnologue, Language List, Unicode,
> the U.N. Statistics Division, and elsewhere.  When we invent a variant
> subtag, we must explain what we mean, because we have nothing to fall
> back on except offline sources like dictionaries and grammars.
> 

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.