New variant subtags for Serbian language

[John Cowan]

Doug Ewell scripsit:

> One question I'd like to see answered, before either we or the RA
> get too involved in breaking out the Serbo-Croatian language(s) even
> further, is how much of this is intended to provide needed detail
> for tagging content and enabling better searches, and how much is
> intended for scholarly analysis and comparison of dialects. 

A fair question.  If we confine ourselves to modern (post-1840) written
content composed within the area of Yugoslavia, then the current tagging
scheme plus the two currently proposed tags will suffice.  If we want
to handle older written content and/or Austrian content and/or spoken
content, we need a more comprehensive scheme.

> >3) Create variant tags for them attached to the "sh" macrolanguage,
> >thus clarifying the denotation of "sh" as including the whole
> >continuum.
> 
> I've become increasingly wary of requests for additional
> macrolanguages after seeing many of the proposals on the 639-3 site,

This is not at all a proposal for a new macrolanguage, but for the use
of tags containing a macrolanguage subtag and a variant subtag, in order
to cover varieties of the macrolanguage that do not have individual
language subtags.  For example, sh-kajkavsk for Kajkavian.

-- 
I am expressing my opinion.  When my            John Cowan
honorable and gallant friend is called,         cowan at ccil.org
he will express his opinion.  This is           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
the process which we call Debate.                   --Winston Churchill