[geolang-comment] National and official languages (was: Quo vadis,GeoLang?)

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Lars Marius Garshol scripsit:

> Having covered ISO 639 it should be really easy to cover RFC 3066, and
> I think the value of RFC 3066 is great enough to justify doing it.

Good.  I am also in the process of getting review for a list of 225
MORE (you've seen 56%):
"national or official language" codes: these are things like fr-FR,
en-US, de-AT, and so on.  These are allowed by both ISO 639 and RFC 3066,
but in principle anything can be used, even oddities like en-DE,
fr-RU, and nv-AU.

To make a topic map that's actually useful, though, I drew on the
Ethnologue's information about national and official languages of
various countries.  For this purpose, a language such as Danish that
is official in only one country does not need a distinct da-DK
code (though da-DE would be the unofficial Danish spoken in Schleswig),
but the 28 languages that are official/national in more than one
country definitely need distinguishing codes, leading to the list
of 225 above.

If anyone wants to review the list, please let me know and I will
email it; they contain just tags, language names, and country names.
I would be especially interested in omissions; one I caught myself
was en-US (the U.S. as such has no official languages, though English
is official in about half the states, English and Spanish in New
Mexico, and English and Hawaiian in Hawai'i).

(further responses in another posting)

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_