m49 code for Scotland?

Doug Ewell dewell at roadrunner.com
Wed Aug 22 07:48:46 CEST 2007


<Karen underscore Broome at spe dot sony dot com> wrote:

> I need this tag today to distinguish this language from other en-UK 
> variants yet to be named.

I hate to bring this up, but... en-GB.

(By the way, this is NOT an invitation to revisit the whole "ISO got it 
wrong with GB versus UK" saga.)

> I really just want to say English as spoken in Scotland and leave it 
> at that, but I'll take a tag for Standard Scottish English if there's 
> no suitable regional tag. Doug suggests that perhaps "Scotland" is a 
> better subtag.

To clarify, I originally suggested "en-england" and "en-scotland" and 
"en-wales" and "en-nireland" to avoid confusion and miunderstanding that 
would result from "en-english", "en-welsh", etc.  Either "scottish" or 
"scotland" is fine if this is the only such variant under discussion, 
since there is no language called "Scottish" with which this would be 
confused (Scots notwithstanding).


Debbie Garside <debbie at ictmarketing dot co dot uk> wrote:

> I am sure that en-scottish would be mistakenly used for Scots.

One aspect to consider in deciding whether to provide this variant might 
be the relative benefit of the granularity Karen needs, versus the risk 
of increased mistagging as Debbie suggests.

> It  is somehwat different as anyone speaking Catalan can also 
> understand Valencian - the differences are minimal as far as I am 
> aware.  The accent alone between the scottish dialects is enough to 
> make it unintelligible to speakers of standard english in my opinion.

This points to at least four different taggable flavors of en-GB:

1.  'en-glasgow'
2.  'en-edinburg'
3.  'en-scouse' (already provided)
3.  'en-GB' or even 'en' (meaning any variety of British English not 
otherwise covered)


John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> To recap:  Currently, UNSD is internally (and informally) using the 
> M.49 codes 827 for England and Wales, 828 for Northern Ireland, and 
> 829 for Scotland.  Making these official could (apparently) be done by 
> request of the U.K.  This would not require ISO 3166/MA action and 
> would not have ccTLD implications.

But they don't appear to have any inclination to do so.


Debbie replied:

> Hmmmm... Ok, I will ask the UK Gov and see what the general consensus 
> is on this.  But, as with Guernsey, Jersey and IM. There would need to 
> be various government interactions if this were to succeed - and the 
> wheels of government turn slowly.  Given that JE et al took about 2 
> years from start to finish don't expect me to come back any sooner :-)

This tells me that if we do decide to solve this problem (which is not a 
given), we should be thinking about registering a variant, not waiting 2 
years or more for a UN or ISO code element which may never be assigned.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
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