Fw: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM

[Addison Phillips]

> 
> 
> However it's registered the "chinese of Hong-Kong (zh-hk)" and the "chinese
> of Macao (zh-mo)" and both are regions of China. Aren't they?

No. These are language tags. The subtags "hk" and "mo" are registered: 
they are ISO 3166-1 codes. Please read the RFC.

My point was not that Valencian isn't a dialect. It was that you need to 
use the correct mechanism to register a subtag for it.

> On the other hand, it is reasonably to think that RFC 4646 is maybe too
> rigid not allowing lower levels than the nation-state levels due the
> complexity of all possible scenarios (particularly in Spain).

No. READ THE RFC. "Region" type subtags only handle areas identified by 
either UN M.49 or ISO 3166-1. This is a historical (but useful) 
curiosity of language tags. Identifying language variations by regional 
affinity on, for example, a sub-national level is possible and useful: 
the subtag type for this, however, is called a 'variant'.

> 
> 
> NOTE: The main reason I request this sub-tag, is no other that to insert
> the language "Valencian" in the options of the browsers in order to serve
> the homepage of (www.aeat.es or www.agenciatributaria.es) in the suitable
> language to the users since their first access. At the moment it can be
> helped for spanish, galician, catalan and valencian (baske in a future). 

Spanish, Galician, Catalan/Valencian, and Basque all have primary 
language subtags. Note that the tag 'ca' has two descriptions: "Catalan" 
and "Valencian". Your problem is to differentiate 'ca'==Catalan from 
'ca'==Valencian.

> I
> supose that a "variant language" wouldn't appear in the list of the
> browsers, so for our purpose it would be useless. Please let me know if i'm
> wrong.
> 

Language tags that include a variant subtag may indeed appear in a 
browser's list of languages. You would have to get the browser vendor to 
include it, of course. But the first step is to register the necessary 
subtag, making the tag you want legal. Users can also add the tag manually.

One of the points of switching to a subtag registry from the former tag 
registry is that almost no implementations supported registered tags. 
Now, with the subtag registry, it is much more likely that your 
registered (variant) subtag will be supported--since the work necessary 
to support it is much reduced.

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.