Add Likely Subtags first step

Philip Newton philip.newton at gmail.com
Sun Jan 25 20:52:17 CET 2015


On 25 January 2015 at 20:22, Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 25 January 2015 at 18:58, Philip Newton <philip.newton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So how would you encode "English as spoken in Scotland"? Something
> like en-GB-x-scottish?

Something like that. There’s no registered subtag for that any more
than there is for ‘English as spoken in Wales’ or ‘English as spoken
in Didcot’.

Even better, though, would be ‘en-XS’, using a region subtag from the
range ‘XA–XZ’ reserved for private use, if sender and receive agree
beforehand that ‘XS’ will mean ‘Scotland’ for the purposes of their
communication; this subtag is unambiguously a region subtag, whereas
‘-x-scottish’ could be anything. See also section 4.6 ‘Considerations
for Private Use Subtags’ in RFC 5646.

(If you did want to use a private-use subtag, then ‘en-x-scotland’ or
‘en-x-scottish’ might be better, using it as a private region subtag,
rather than as a private variant subtag as in your example
‘en-GB-x-scottish’.)

>> Similarly with ‘de-(de-)1996’, which cannot mean ‘German as spoken in
>> 1996, or as written in that year in any orthography’, because that is
>> not what the variant subtag was registered as meaning. And
>> ‘uz-baku1926’ cannot mean ‘Uzbek as spoken in Baku in 1926’, nor can
>> ‘ja-Latn-hepburn’ mean ‘variety of Japanese written in the Latin
>> alphabet in Hepburn, Iowa’.
>
> What about en-US (American English dialect), en-GB (British English
> dialect), en-IE (Irish English accent) and others?

Here, ‘US, GB, IE’ are region subtags, not variant subtags, so you’re
comparing apples and oranges.

> I would imagine a better example would be the variety of English
> spoken in Oxfordshire.

That would also seem more likely to me than the speech of just one city.

Cheers,
Philip


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