Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Mon Apr 25 06:42:32 CEST 2016


> Will it be possible to include such a private use tag into BCP47? If not then I guess the lang attribute will not indicate anything for anyone else than those who have knowledge about it?

See https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47#section-2.2.1 – you can use x-whatever or rule 3 in that section:
The subtags in the range 'qaa' through 'qtz' are reserved for
       private use in language tags.  These subtags correspond to codes
       reserved by ISO 639-2 for private use.  These codes MAY be used
       for non-registered primary language subtags (instead of using
       private use subtags following 'x-').  Please refer to Section 4.6
      for more information on private use subtags.

So x-elf or qlf or something are valid BCP-47 tags.  Same as any other “real” tag, if the application(s) don’t have data for it, then it won’t have any special behavior, however they shouldn’t break things.

Personally, I’d try a qlf type 3-letter private use code rather than the x- code as it would perhaps fit the expectations of the platform better.  Also, some systems might prefer that the script also be used.  Eg: on a Windows 8+ machine you can add qlf-Latn (or qlf-Latn-SE) to the user’s language profile, but “qlf” by itself isn’t recognized.

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> It can last into eternity, we don't know how long time it can take until it gets encoded. This can become a messy solution for Elfdalian.
Well, preferably it wouldn’t have to last for eternity.  And, of course, there’s the chance that someone else might use “qlf” (or whatever you decide) for something else.  I don’t know if there’s a list of well-known private tags that you might want to avoid.  However, the risk is a serious collision problem seems pretty low.
-Shawn

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