[Tlhingan-hol] 2 letter language code for Klingon?

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 10/04/2011 03:34 AM, Michael Roney, Jr. PKT wrote:
> I'm very thankful that Klingon has managed to gain an official HTML
> language code of tlh, but is there anyway we can get a 2 letter code
> as well?

Michael has already answered this in his terse way, but just to be a 
little more explicit... Not every language is going to get a 2-letter 
ISO-639-1 code. Most don't. The two-letter codes are for the more common 
languages. Even languages with many more speakers and much more 
literature than Klingon like Balinese, Cherokee, Ge'ez, Hawaiian, Tok 
Pisin, etc. don't have a 2-letter code. Moreover, new ISO-639-1 codes 
are not added if an ISO-639-2 code already exists anyway.

> I'm often dealing with people who only use 2 letter codes.

Anyone who "only uses 2-letter codes" is seriously short-changing a lot 
of languages out there. You're supposed to support the 3-letter ones 
too, if you plan to have any wide coverage.

> It'd also be nice if I had a region code...

I don't even know how a region code for Klingon makes sense. We can't 
expect ISO to encode things like "Kronos" or "Sa'Qej region" and so on, 
any more than ISO should have to encode Beleriand, Aman, or Lórien, or 
the near-infinite number of regions invented by every other fiction 
writer in the history of the world. Region codes mean exactly that: 
*regions*, not languages. There isn't a "region code for English"; 
there's a language code for English and a region code for places all 
over the world, and you can speak of English as spoken in that place. So 
I suppose it's quite reasonable (if uninformative) to use tlh-US or 
tlh-CA for regions of Klingon, if the dialects differed.

> I'd accept a null region code if one existed.

Maybe use one of the private-use codes, like AA, ZZ, or anything 
starting with Q or X.


~mark