Addition request: alsatian

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 06:05:02AM +0100,
 Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de> wrote 
 a message of 43 lines which said:

> An old de-FR

I've seen de-FR in the wild, used by people who do not know about
"gsw" or who disagree with the whole idea of the alemannic
language. These people consider alsatian to be a dialect of german,
not of alemannic and they tag it as de-FR, which is fun if you
remember the history of Alsace in the 19th and 20th century :-) 

(ISO 639 differs in that respect.)

> In fact I was surprised that "gsw" in the sense "Schwyzerdütsch" is
> supposed to encompass "Alsatian".

The whole alemannic language is quite debatable. It is in ISO 639 so
we use it, but many people disagree, they said a collection of
dialects is not a language.

IMHO, the description in the LSR is incomplete. It says:

Type: language
Subtag: gsw
Description: Swiss German
Description: Alemannic

Why is only "swiss german" (itself a group of dialects) mentioned and
not alsatian or other dialects of alemannic? I do not know.