Editors, All - FYI, some information from the I18N group re normative
reference for language tags.
Begin forwarded message:
From: ext Richard Ishida <[email protected]>
Date: March 1, 2010 9:53:20 AM EST
Subject: Information about latest specs for language tagging
It seems that a number of people are unaware of recent changes with
regards to language tagging specifications. As it is important to
use the right reference for spec development, I hope the following
information will prove useful.
You used to specify a language tag using RFC 1766, and then RFC
3066, both of which referred you to a list of ISO codes for
language subtags and another ISO list for country names.
RFC 3066 was replaced by two RFCs: 4646 (Tags for Identifying
Languages) and 4647 (Matching of Language Tags). These two RFCs
were concatenated at a single location under the name BCP 47. It is
intended that BCP 47 will be an unchanging name with a single,
unchanging URI that gives access to the most up-to-date RFCs as
they are developed. This is particularly helpful since it is not
clear from reading RFC the itself that it has been obsoleted.
In September 2009, RFC 4646 was obsoleted by RFC 5646 (but RFC 4647
remains current). RFCs 5646 and 4647 are still referred to as BCP
47, and BCP 47 is accessed via the same URI as before.
The latest specifications for language tagging allow a number of
different types of subtag, over and above language and country/
region, and point you to the IANA Language Subtag Registry (rather
than ISO code lists) to find the (almost 8,000) subtags which are
now available for use.
Any language tags constructed using the obsoleted RFCs are still
valid according to the syntax of the latest incarnation of BCP 47,
though some tags are now deprecated.
We recommend that you currently use the following reference for
language tag syntax.
[BCP47]
Tags for Identifying Languages, A. Phillips and M. Davis,
Editors, September 2009.
Available at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt
The following additional links may be useful for further reading:
IANA Language Subtag Registry http://www.iana.org/assignments/
language-subtag-registry
Language tags in HTML and XML http://www.w3.org/International/
articles/language-tags/
Choosing a Language Tag http://www.w3.org/International/questions/
qa-choosing-language-tags
Language Subtag Lookup tool http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/
If you have further questions about language tags, please contact
the i18n WG.
Hope that helps,
RI
============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/
