Variant subtag proposal: Høgnorsk variety of Norwegian

[John Cowan]

Leif Halvard Silli scripsit:

> >> (A Swedish net.friend of mine from central Sweden says he understands
> >> his neighbors across the border better than he does Swedes from other
> >> parts of his country; it's hardly surprising that many isoglosses should
> >> run east and west on the Norway-Sweden peninsula.)
> > 
> > This would be our friends in Jamtland, whose dialect is considered as 
> > Norwegian even by Swedish linguists. 

On checking, he is from Västergötland, and I suppose by "central" he
means something like being close to the population centroid in Närke,
rather than being close to the geographical center in Medelpad.  I further
suppose that by his neighbors he means those in Østfold.

> Prefix of what ... For spoken Jämtlandish, one could insist that it
> should be tagged as either 'nn-SE' or 'no-SE', I suppose.

People who wanted such a tag might prefer "nn-osttrond".  :-)

> Cool. I never thought about that Sweden had their own Nynorsk. ;-)

Language boundaries rarely match political ones.  For centuries the
boundary of Scots was considerably south of the Scotland-England line,
though it has receded north toward the political boundary in the last
century.

There was a minor kerfuffle on this list about traditional
Scanian dialect.  Ethnologue gives it the code 'scy', but it
is excluded from 639-3 (and a fortiori from the LSR).  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanian_dialects for details.

> So, then I would like to hear your opinion about inserting a note 
> explicitly forbidding to use 'nb' as a prefix of 'hognorsk', as doing 
> so would be illogical and not intended. 

Is anyone likely to do so?  After all, you are not proposing to forbid
'da', or 'en', or 'min', which would be equally "illogical and not
intended".

-- 
John Cowan   cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
        --Thomas Henry Huxley