request for subtag for Elfdalian

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan wrote:

> The fact is that English uses the old Latin names of the provinces
> and their subdivisions rather than the Swedish names.  It is not
> a question of a new transcription into English, but the use of
> traditional English names.

In BCP 47 we use ISO 639-3 names, and although Elfdalian obviously 
doesn't have one (otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion), here 
is what Ethnologue says on its Swedish page 
(http://www.ethnologue.com/language/swe):

Location: [ ...] Elfdalian dialect: northern Dalarna, southeastern 
Älvdalen municipality.

Dialects: [ ...] Elfdalian (Älvdalska, Övdalian, Övdalsk), [...] 
Elfdalian is considered the most archaic vernacular within Dalecarlian, 
preserving many feature of Old Norse.

The parenthesized forms are local forms; this is a standard Ethnologue 
convention.

And of course Ethnologue names are about as closely related to 639-3 
names as you can get.

I think it's clear that the preferred English name is Elfdalian, 
regardless of what it "should" be, or what it is in other languages. Of 
course, this is orthogonal to the question of what the BCP 47 *subtag 
value* should be.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸