Re: Correct locale for non-national languages?

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

tor 2003-02-27 klockan 19.13 skrev Charles Voelger:
> locales are ussually lang_COUNTRY as in en_US or en_GB, but what is the
> correct format for an 'international' language such as esperanto?

Btw, this problem also affects languages such as Interlingua (ia) and
Yiddish (yi). Those also very much aren't tied to any particular
countries.


> I have seen eo_EO - but this seems wrong to me as EO is not an ISO
> country code, and shouldnt be confused as such.  I've also seen eo_XX
> but that just seems sloppy to me.

Yeah, that seems terribly broken. Non-standard language codes shouldn't
ever be used.


> Is there an approved way of doing this?  Should one make seperate
> locales for different countries, so we'd have eo_US, eo_DK, etc etc? Or
> would it be best to just have "eo" and leave the "_COUNTRY" off?

I don't know myself. I was hoping for someone more knowledgeable to
chime in here. In the recent gdm patch that was discussed, we only used
the language code and didn't set a full locale.

I think it's very much up to the user to create a suitable locale in
these cases. So an Esperanto user in Denmark would need to generate and
use an eo_DK locale definition as you point out, much like an English
user on for example Malta might prefer to generate and use a more
suitable en_MT locale instead of the en_GB, en_CA, or en_US that
basically ships with all distros.


Christian