Scottish English (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM)

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> A remaining matter is whether we should, by setting the Prefix field 
> appropriately, encourage people to use en-uk-scotland rather than 
> simply en-scotland.  My tentative opinion is that we should not, but I 
> am willing to be convinced otherwise.  En-uk-scotland is wordier, of 
> course; the argument for it is that it has better fallback.  In any 
> case, people will be free to do either; this is a matter of SHOULD 
> rather than MUST.

(putting aside the fact that we're talking about "en-GB" and not 
"en-UK")

I don't support this unless we also go back and deprecate "en-scouse" in 
favor on "en-GB-scouse", and "en-boont" in favor of "en-US-boont".  Some 
of the differences between English English and Scottish English are of 
the same magnitude as the differences between English English and 
American (or Australian) English, so I'm not sure remove-from-right 
fallback is much of a help here.

When you say "people will be free to do either," what that really means 
is that people will go ahead and use "en-scotland" anyway, whether "en" 
or not is a recommended prefix, because it is more convenient or 
intuitive.  While we ought to do the right thing, we also ought to make 
it easy for users to do the right thing.

Naturally, the counterexample to all this is "en-GB-oed".

--
Doug Ewell · Fullerton, California, USA · RFC 4645 · UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages