Montenegrin

[Peter Constable]

From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Leif Halvard Silli

> I don't think that it is necessarily is necessary to keep 'sh' as a 
> macrolanguage in order to support a separate tag for Montenegrin. 
> My point here, was only and solely to question whether 'sh' is a 
> macrolanguage.

In ISO 639, 'sh' / 'hbs' will not get _un_encoded; it will always be coded and defined to represent the (real or putative) language sometimes known as "Serbo-Croatian". Likewise, none of "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" will be _un_encoded. This is per the stability policy for ISO 639. Any or all of these could be deprecated, though. In theory, the scope attribute for "Serbo-Croatian" could be changed from "macrolanguage" to "individual language" and the macrolanguage mapping entries in 639-3 for 'hbs' removed, but that would not make sense since that mapping would still be appropriate given the semantics of those entries. 

Given that, if "Montenegrin" were coded in ISO 639, then it would only make sense for it to be added in the macrolanguage language mappings from 'hbs'.

Now, what happens in the IANA language subtag registry is, of course, not bound only by what happens in ISO 639, but can also be driven by decisions made on this list, within the constraints permitted by BCP 47.



Peter