language subtag registration request: Region EU

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Fri Jan 13 13:42:32 CET 2006


Markus,

could you explain what function (not just "nice to have", but an actual 
function you want to perform) you need "xx-EU" for?

I simply can't think of one I'd want it for.

--On torsdag, januar 12, 2006 08:58:35 -0800 Markus Scherer 
<markus.icu at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Unlike the concepts "Europe," "Western Europe," etc. that are reflected
>> in the numeric subtags, "European Union" is not only a geographical but
>> also a political concept.  The European Union is not the same as
>> "Europe"; it excludes Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland.
>
> I know. (I grew up in the EU.) It is this particular geographical
> entity that I am after.
>
>> [...] there was an explicit desire in the WG not to
>> extend this to the numeric subtags by including the UN's economic
>> groupings.  EU seems similar to those.  The goal of region subtags is to
>> identify linguistic differences, and it's unclear to me how EU would do
>> this in a way that 150 and friends would not.
>
> For German, de-150 and de-155 would include (high) German as spoken in
> Switzerland, but de-EU would not. de-EU would be broad enough for
> german in DE/AT/LX however.
>
> For (sophisticated) matching, *-EU would match any language spoken in
> the EU, which is very different from *-150.

you should take that to the LTRU WG as an example.

At the moment, I don't see any proposal that would allow you to standardize 
a matching rule where *-EU would return anything.

[btw: if this worked, given the number of Vietnamese in Europe, would *-EU 
match "vn"? And how would one know?]

                     Harald






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