211640 - "sc" language identifier is Sardinian, not Scots

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Internationalization: Localization, defect)

Description

[Thomas Thurman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030602 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030602 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

The code sc-GB is used in Mozilla for a Scots English localisation project:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html

RFC 1766 says that the first part of a language code must be an ISO 639 language
code. However, ISO 639-2 specifies that the language code SC is Sardinian:

http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html

Thus, the use of "sc-GB" is contrary to the standard.

Since Scots English is a dialect of English, in the same way that en-US, en-AU
etc. are dialects of English, it should be given an en-XX code. There is no ISO
3166-1 code for Scotland:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/10faq/frequently-asked-questions.html#QS08

However, the ISO 3166-2 standard, which specifies codes for regions of
countries, gives "GB-SCT" for Scotland. So the code "en-GB-SCT" would seem
fitting for the Scots English project, even though RFC 1766 does not provide for
3166-2 names (it provides for more elements than two, but leaves their meaning
unspecified).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Henrik Lynggaard Hansen]

Confirming this bug on the MLP pages. 

However I belive the right notation to be sco-GB (Scotsish - Britian)

Moving to Mozilla.org product. 

Comment 2

[Thomas Thurman]

What's the naming scheme here? Is it the same as in RFC 1766?

RFC 1766 says in section 2 that values other than "i", "x" and
two-letter ISO 639 codes cannot be assigned, other than by
updating the RFC.

In addition, Scots (as opposed to Scots Gaelic) is clearly a
dialect of English: compare
 http://light.utoronto.ca/~lamw/gaelic/
with
 http://scots.jriddell.org/

and should therefore have an "en-" prefix, just as the
translation to English English and Canadian English do.

Comment 3

[Thomas Thurman]

Oh, seems I'm wrong in comment 2: sorry. RFC 3066 provides for the use of ISO
639-2 tags, and that standard contains "sco" which is clearly the language used
in this translation:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_iso639.asp?code=sco

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

reassigning endico's bugs to default owner

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug is clearly a problem of MLP, so --> L10n and taking.

Comment 6

[Thomas Thurman]

Renaming in title to "Scots", since many speakers don't consider it a dialect of English.

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

Those pages have been archived and deleted from the main stie, so this is invalid now.