Github user osma commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/jena/pull/237
I've been thinking about this, and I can't see how this could produce a
usable order when there are several language tags (even subtags) involved. For
example, in a multilingual SKOS thesaurus, it's quite likely that there are
`en-US` and `en-GB` labels mixed together (I know at least a couple of thesauri
that do this in their SKOS files). Think about e.g.
```
ex:zea_mays a skos:Concept ;
skos:prefLabel "corn"@en-US, "maize"@en-GB .
ex:coffee a skos:Concept ;
skos:prefLabel "coffee"@en-US, "coffee"@en-GB .
```
Now an ORDER BY that sorts primarily by language tag, then by
language-specific collation rules, would order these skos:prefLabels as:
1. `"coffee"@en-GB`
1. `"maize"@en-GB`
1. `"coffee"@en-US`
1. `"corn"@en-US`
I have a hard time seeing how this order would be useful to anyone. These
are all English language words; as a user I don't care whether they are sorted
by GB or US collation rules (even if they differed, as in fr-CA vs. fr-FR), but
this is clearly worse than the current behavior which sorts first by lexical
value, then by language tag.
My conclusion of this thought experiment is that there should be a way to
specify the collation order in the ORDER BY statement independent of the
language tags of the literals being sorted.
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