2011/8/31 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Philippe Verdy wrote: >> the existing >> BCP 47 implementations, but that would limit the may-be future >> extension of ISO 639 to longer codes): ISO 639 could immediately say >> that it will never allocate any language code (of any length) starting >> by qa..qz. > > Not possible; 'qu' is already taken for Quechua. And not necessary: > 'qaa' through 'qtz' are reserved.
I said using the prefixes starting by "qa..qt", these prefixes are not supposed to be used alone, there must be additional letters. so this does not apply to "qu" alone (yes, assigned to the Quechua macrolanguage, or isn't it a language subfamily ?). But I admit that there's an additional caveat: BCP47 opens all codes with 5 to 8 characters to possible registration in the IANA registry. I have not checked if there were some registration of language tags starting by "qa..qt" in the IANA registry, but there's apaprently no policy defined to forbid such registration. And your "not necessary" comment does not apply here too: it just assigns the 3-letter codes for local use, not the longer codes which are only reserved for the 4-letter codes, but not assigned for private use (and there's also no provision given in ISO 649 to protect an encoding space for 5-letter codes or longer, as they are now usable for IANA registration).
