>Also out of interest, I noticed that en was an alias of en_US, is there
>a reason for this? 

Historical reasons? Because Americans wrote the software? Because the
population of America is larger then that of Britain? Because it 
doesn't really matter?

>In other cases where several countrys have adopted to speak the same
>language the origional country is the default, eg de == de_DE not de_AT
>or de_CH etc.  

Is modern-day Germany really the source of modern German? de is only
German since 1500 (German from 1050 to 1500 is gmh), and doesn't include
the spoken language of north Germany (nds - Low German)*. Did Austria
speak a different language prior to recent times? How did a bunch of 
city states that didn't come together until the 1880's force Austria,
the head of the Austrian-Hungary empire, to change its language?

* Disputed by some Germans, but that's how the tags are assigned.

I strongly suspect that the language covered by de didn't originate
soley in Germany; that it's the union of several dialects over that
whole area that have been converging and diverging for the past few
centuries. 

Why does this matter? Because it makes it clear that language to country
assignments are arbitrary, which they are in real life. For every case
where you can point to one origin country, there are cases - Basque, German - where 
you can't point to one country as the origin.
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