language subtag registration request: Region EU

[Jeremy Carroll]

Peter Constable wrote:

> Is there a real scenario in which a distinction is made -- 
> something like de-EU vs. de-DE, or fr-EU vs. fr-FR? I don't 
 > believe Markus has demonstrated such distinctions exist.

In the Semantic Web applications that I deal with there is cost in false 
negatives, i.e. de-EU appearing different from de-DE while in fact being 
the same.

If in fact xy-EU was always equivalent to xy-XY where xy is a language 
spoken in the EU and XY is the country most prominently linked with xy, 
then the lack of syntactic equality between the two tags would cause 
problems that would need code. I would like to be clear that there is 
benefit in return for the cost of that code.

(Admittedly 3066bis, by allowing the use of the region codes, does 
expand the problem of false negatives significantly over 3066, and I am 
not expecting to have to deal with it in practice; but that extension 
was at least motivated by one or more compelling examples of need)

Jeremy