Re: [ubl] Issue: two-letter or three-letter language codes?

[Andrea Caccia <andrea.caccia@studiocaccia.com>]

The most commonly used syntax for language codes is specified in RFC5646, it is an Internet Best Current Practice.
A language tag is expressed by a sequence of subtags separated by a dash "-".
The first subtag is the primary subtag and is mandatory. It is the shortest ISO 639 code (i.e. it is a 2 or 3 characters code where the 3 characters code is used only if the language does not exist in the 2 characters code list).
It is recommended use lowercase for languages to distinguish between from countries (e.g. IT=Italy; it=Italian).

Additional tags are used to specify the script and the region, for example:
- "en-US" represents English ('en') as used in the United States ('US').
- "sr-Latn-RS" represents Serbian ('sr') written using Latin script ('Latn') as used in Serbia ('RS').

Coming back to UBL, a 2 char code is probably ok in most cases (if you do not have the need to refer to a language not included in the list of 2 char length codes, this is not common).
Using upper case is not recommended but not forbidden by ISO639-1.

Andrea


Il giorno 10/mar/2011, alle ore 16.40, Jon Bosak ha scritto:

> Hello UBL TC and developers,
> 
> A question has arisen with regard to language codes.  It appears that
> UN/CEFACT uses the ISO three-letter lowercase language codes, whereas
> UBL currently includes a list of ISO two-letter uppercase language codes
> (both are ISO standards as far as we know).  We're not going to be
> inclined to change something in 2.1 that already shipped in 2.0, so the
> question is: does anyone know of a good reason why UBL should switch to
> the three-letter lowercase form?
> 
> We need to have this issue resolved by next week, so if anyone has an
> opinion, please let us know ASAP.
> 
> Jon
> 
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