[OSM-dev] Multilingual Maps Overlays

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 3 November 2010 13:43, "Marc Schütz" <schuetzm at gmx.net> wrote:
>> > : use name:...,old_name:... together with the ISO 639-1/2 code (which,
>> admittedly, don't exist for most dialects).
>>
>>
>> they don't exist because they are not languages IMHO.
>
> I don't think the standard is supposed to list only languages, because it already includes codes for Swiss German/Alemannic (gsw), Kölsch (ksh) and Bavarian (bar).
>
>>
>>
>> > This probably works for Swiss German but in case of e.g. East Franconian
>> (which doesn't have a language tag) you have to be careful to distinguish
>> between Standard German as spoken in, say, Bayreuth, and East Franconian as
>> spoken in Bayreuth. Thus you cannot simply use de-... for the latter, as
>> it would mean the former.
>>
>>
>> A lot of the characteristics of dialects (at least in German) derives
>> from pronounciation. Usually there is no common way to write it (as
>> you generally write in German (Hochdeutsch)). Do you suggest to
>> transscribe pronounciation?
>
> How you would actually transscribe the dialects/language variants is another matter.
>
> I used this example to show that there are cases where it is difficult to come up with a correct language tag.
>
> If "de" means Standard German, then "de-CH" means the variant of Standard German that is use in Switzerland, and thus cannot be used to refer Swiss German. Fortunately, there is a code for Swiss German to work around this problem.
>
> But there is none for East Franconian. Now that I think of it, maybe a different workaround would be to use "gmw-x-franconia" or the like to refer to "the West Germanic language used in Franconia". But it's still ugly...

One possibility is to just use the full name of the dialect (in
English or otherwise) where no good iso code is available, so
name:gmw:East Franconian= or something similar.  Maybe the "gmw:" part
is not needed because the fallback language is something that the
clients can figure out.

I agree dialects should generally be treated like separate languages.

Cheers