Preliminary proposal for 225 language-country pairs

John Cowan cowan@mercury.ccil.org
Mon, 18 Feb 2002 23:27:16 -0500 (EST)


Mark Davis scripsit:

> Why do this? en_US is already definable. Is it to be able to have a
> locale like en-PN_US, a locale with the conventions determined by the
> variety of English used in the US as spoken by immigrants from
> Pitcairn?

Locales have nothing to do with this.  RFC 3066 language tags come in four
flavors:  those registered with ISO 639, those registered with IANA,
private-use tags beginning with x-, and tags of the form
xx-yy or xxx-yy, which do not need to be registered with IANA but can be.

I am attempting to compile a list of (potentially) useful combination tags.
In theory all 436 * 239 = 17004 combinations are usable, but most
of them are plain silly: there just is no distinctively Australian variety
of Navajo.

But by all reports en-PT is pretty different from en-US or en-GB.
SIL goes so far as to call it a separate language.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_