Hi everyone I'd like to open up the currently unresolved question of multilingual tagging in Wales.
In the Mapio Cymru project we've been exploring Welsh language mapping https://openstreetmap.cymru/ and we've done some thinking about how Welsh and English naming works in parts of Wales. We plan to organise some (online) workshops in November to encourage people to add Welsh language tags to the map. Those workshops will initially be delivered through the medium of Welsh but we hope also to run some in English at a later date. The wiki entry for Wales in Multilingual Names highlights that this has been an area of discussion. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Wales The current entry is short and so I'll reproduce it here in full. *[starts/---]In Wales, the name tag should be used for whatever the local population uses.name:en and name:cy can be used to give English and Welsh names where such names exist but are not the name used by the local population. (cy is the two letter ISO639-1 language code for the Welsh language.)The percentage of Welsh speakers varies very significantly across the country and visiting mappers should be aware of local usage.* *[---/ends]* >From a Mapio Cymru perspective we'd like to propose, for discussion, replacing this text with the following (reasoning follows): *[starts/---]In Wales the name tag should be used for the name by which the place is widely known in Wales. This could be English or Welsh but not both. So name: Wales or name: Cymru would be acceptable but not name: Wales/Cymru.name:en should be used to give the name by which the place or feature is known in English.name:cy should be used to give the name by which the place or feature is known in WelshEven though this will lead to apparent duplication. For example:name: Swanseaname:en Swanseaname:cy AbertaweThis allows places and features to be named unambiguously and so rather than duplication is conveying useful new information.* *[---/ends]* *Our Reasoning* Wales is a bilingual country and many places have different names in Welsh and English. Many other places have the same name in Welsh and English. It is not possible to infer from the Name tag whether the contents are in Welsh or English. We believe that the only unambiguous way to name places and features in Wales is to use the name:en and name:cy tags. The "name" tag does not fit the Wales context well but we recognise its importance within the wider OSM community. Though in some bilingual countries the name tag contains both versions of a name and notably in the Basque country this seemingly reflects the official state policy of designating the official name of a town as its two names delimited by a hyphen. We believe in the Wales context this would be better achieved by processing name:en and name:cy tags. We're really happy to get some feedback, questions or comments on this proposal. Especially highlighting things we might have missed or misconstrued. Cheers Ben -- Mapio Cymru <https://mapio.cymru/> OpenStreetMap.Cymru
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