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Cantonese and Manderin language tagging.

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The IETF "Language Tag Registry Update" working group has noted that lots of data is tagged as "zh-Hant", regardless of whether or not it is pronounced as Cantonese or Manderin.  For video and audio however, this doesn't allow a fine enough distinction, and so the LTRU is working on revising RFC 4646/4647 and the registry to allow for new tags to distiguish Cantonese and Manderin from the "macrolanguage" of Chinese.

So in the future we should expect to see "cmn" and "yue" tags instead of zh.  The LTRU is still a bit in flux about the details, but it is clear that in the future newly tagged data will use "cmn" and "yue".  This is going to cause "an interesting time" since lots of legacy data, resources and systems will continue to use the zh tags.

User configurations may need to change, such as allowing both "cmn and zh" in a web browser's language configuration.  Applications and systems may also need to change to provide "cmn" resources if "zh" was asked for, or vice versa.  Content providers may also need to retag existing data to distinguish between Cantonese and Manderin.

With these types of changes, the adoption rate is usually quite varied, so expect some applications and content to shift rapidly to using the new recommended names once that new standard is created.  Other data and systems will probably remain unchanged for a very long time, leading to very interesting scenarios when those environments communicate with each other.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2007
    @orcmid: I suppose it is understood to be a typo mistake :-) Making users aware of this issue is close to impossible. In particular, they get used to current situation, and any change means they need to learn something new. Many non-technical computer users DO resist changes, no matter it becomes more "correct" or not.

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2007
    I think you're right, and that some users will resist changing.  I wasn't trying to specify a "goodness" level about the issue :), but hopefully if the application developers understand the issues they can improve the change between the names because some people are certainly going to be using the new tags while others continue to use the existing tags.