Issues and Proposals for Language Tags
Intended Audience: |
Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, Marketer |
Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced |
Language tags are used to designate the language in word processing and in web
pages. The tags facilitate the use of tools such as search engines, automatic
hyphenation, spell checking, grammar checking, dictionaries, and machine
translation. However, the current International Standards Organization (ISO)
standards for language tags cover relatively few languages. In addition, there
are separate three-letter codes for the library community and the rest of the
world (see ISO-639). There is also an ISO two-letter standard. More
comprehensive tag sets exist, such as by SIL's Ethnologue; however, there are
additional issues with such sets, such as consistent level of detail. This
panel presents the issues with language tags and the proposals being considered
by ISO, including use of the Ethnologue tag set, use of a new four-letter code,
use of a language tag set registry, and revision of the three-letter codes. It
also solicits input from the Unicode community on the best approach for
obtaining a comprehensive tag set. Panel members will include representatives
from ISO, the Ethnologue, the Unicode Consortium, the U.S. Government, and
industry.
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