[OT] Latin American Spanish

Sorry for this off-topic item, but I'm wanting to get some info and have
good reason to think the people on this list can provide it (because I have
a recollection of this being discussed among many of the people on one of
these lists at some point in the past).

A request was made a while ago for a tag to be registered with IANA per the
terms of RFC 3066 that can be used for Spanish content that has been
tailored in terms of vocabulary to make it suitable for use throughout
Latin America, though not necessarily elsewhere. This seems like a
reasonable request to me, as I've heard people in the localisation industry
say numerous times that they need to be able to assign just such a metadata
attribute to such content. The language tag reviewer is insisting, however,
on examples illustrating that there can be data so characterised. This
request doesn't affect me personally, but I believe there's a valid problem
to be solved, and I want to help see the issue get discussed without
getting hung up on the red herring that Spanish spoken in the Americas is
not a single unified variety.

I'm wondering if people here can provide any specific examples showing ways
in which vocabulary (or other language features) can be constrained to make
content usable throughout the Americas, though not necessarily guaranteeing
the same elsewhere.



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>

Received on Thursday, 5 September 2002 22:37:58 UTC