regional language variation (was RE: registration requests re Portuguese)

[Phillips, Addison]

> >
> > For en-US and en-UK, nds-DE and nds-NL, and at least up to now, pt-BR
> > and pt-PT, the language+region combination has served to distinguish
> > dialects that many users felt needed distinguishing.
> 
> All those ones you mention surely did their part in the days when all was
> needed was a coarse-ishly delimited set of basic _culture_-related tags (like,
> currency, thousands, and date format). In days where the more and more
> fine distinctions are being set up in the _language_ area (and more and more
> folks sort of get their share of ramplight from those), not quite so.
> 

Those days are not gone: there are many cases where languages are spread across multiple regions and, even though the variation in language can be small (perhaps much smaller than en-US vs. en-GB), there are culturally linked variations in language usage such as date format, calendar presentation, and the like. These are captured by what we sometimes call a "locale" and you can see these variations collected, for example, by CLDR [1].

Addison

[1] http://cldr.unicode.org