Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian
Caoimhin O Donnaile
caoimhin at smo.uhi.ac.uk
Mon Apr 25 20:12:12 CEST 2016
> Compare Peter's suggestion with what was done for Latgalian in 2010 to
> distinguish it from Latvian:
Am I right in thinking that if swe was made a macrolanguage encompassing
Swedish and Elfdalian, then the ISO 639 RA would have to register a new
three letter code for Swedish proper, in the same way that a new three
letter code lvs was registered for Latvian? Let’s say for the sake of
argument that this new code was svn.
The two-letter ISO 639-1 code sv would then presumably be equated with
swe (just as it is at present) rather than with svn. Just as:
lv is equated with macrolanguage lav rather than standard Latvian lvs,
ms is equated with macrolanguage msa rather than standard Malay zsm,
az is equated with macrolanguage aze rather than dominant Northern Azeri azj,
and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639_macrolanguage
The correct code for Swedish (proper) on the Internet would then become
svn rather than sv, in the same way that the correct code for standard
Latvian is lvs rather than lv. Except that Google (e.g. in Google
Translate) takes the pragmatic approach of continuing to use lv for
standard Latvian, ms for standard Malay, etc.
This seems to me like a messy situation which would be best avoided
except when there is no alternative.
Caoimhín
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