Re: Language Identifier List Criteria

>Some languages are spoken in many countries, and the language is not 
>distinctive in each country. I have started to accept suggestions as to 
>which language-region codes do not represent a distinct language 
>variation, and therefore are not recommended as tags, without good reason.
http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/language-identifiers.html

The criteria should be political rather than linguistic ones, as both the 
ISO 639 language tags and the ISO 3166 country codes are based on 
political agreement. Therefore I would not speak of "distict language 
variations", but of distinct *official standards* (or at least distinct 
conventions). Variations can be found everywhere (even within one 
political region), whereas the same conventions can be followed by several 
countries.

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 02:12:11 UTC