Record for Spanglish variant

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Thu Jan 5 02:10:53 CET 2017


I'm not opposed to figuring out how to tag these things, but waiting to make sure there's a scalable solution seems wise.  I'm not sure there are any perfect options though.

The tags that have been mentioned.
* I don't think the individual registration "scales".
* I don't think -t- is a great choice, too overloaded.
* en-c-es is a little better, but I don't like the flip-floppiness of es-c-en meaning something similar.  Could fallback to en (or es) that way, which might be convenient in some cases.
* mul-c-en-es seems like it'd be more straightforward, however fallback would be terrible (maybe that's a good thing? En-c-es would fall back to en, but maybe that's not a good thing?)  Also "mul" seems to mean something different (like this book has English and German, not necessarily that they're mixed in the same sentence - or even the same word).

Tagging things seems more complicated.  Wikipedia mentions at least a dozen variations of Spanglish in passing.

* Tagging for a library seems reasonably straightforward in my non-librarian view. 
Saying "these books are Spanglish" seems OK to me even if they're different versions of Spanglish.  At least they've been labeled.  There are "English" books I might have to struggle with, so I guess that seems OK.

* Machine resource lookup seems more problematic.
The poems provided earlier could be mutually unintelligible to speakers of the other variation's version of Spanglish.  If I want "Spanglish" because I'm a Cuban-American in Miami I may expect different resources than a speaker in California.  
Getting the "wrong" Spanglish would probably seem to me like someone was just making it up, or, even worse, belittling me.

* Spelling dictionaries seem even worse
I suppose I could make a spelling "dictionary" for my version of Spanglish, but there's very little chance that speller would be useful to other people.

In some ways these language combinations are up to the speaker.  My family spoke our own "Engleutsch". (speaks, but it's devolved).  Other people would do it differently.

Asking for community localization for one of these mixed languages would be similar to asking for localization for x-pirate.  Someone's going to translate a parrot as 'a parrot, argh', and someone else would choose 'a parrghot.'

So, would that mean there is a "need" for mul-c-es-en-v-miami, mul-c-es-en-v-la to be useful for resource tagging?

-Shawn

________________________________________
From: Ietf-languages <ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no> on behalf of Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2017 12:09 PM
To: ietf-languages
Subject: Record for Spanglish variant

Here is the record for Michael's proposed 'spanglis' variant.

I'm posting this as Co-Designated Expert, or what John Cowan would call "Official Doug," not necessarily as a proponent of the subtag. My personal opinion is that we need more time to evaluate the best solution to this problem before anything is registered, either here or in CLDR.

--

LANGUAGE SUBTAG MODIFICATION
File-Date: 2017-xx-xx
%%
Type: variant
Subtag: spanglis
Description: Spanglish
Prefix: en
Prefix: es
Comments: Name given to a variety of contact dialects of English and
  Spanish
%%


--
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