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Babel

The multilingual framework to localize LaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX

Locale naming

Draft

The babel multilingual framework for LaTeX employs specific conventions for naming and referencing locale files (both the traditional ldf mechanism and the modern ini one), prioritizing compatibility with established standards (Unicode CLDR, IANA/BCP 47 registry) across the web and international data repositories. Babel adheres to those standards for locale classification, which are based (according to ISO 639) not only on linguistic similarity, but also on the existence of a common literature or of a common ethnolinguistic identity.

For the naming of the locales at the user level, the following conventions are used.

Languages, and therefore the corresponding files, are named with the English name, lowercased and without spaces: northernkurdish. Diacritics and non-letters are just removed (lu for “Lü”, kinaraya for “Kinaray-a”, bosniaherzegovina for “Bosnia & Herzegovina”). Other fields, like script and region, are separated with hyphens: serbian-latin, spanish-mexico. Some regions may have long names (eg, bosniaherzegovina), so, for convenience, the corresponding code is also allowed (ba, in this case).

They are taken from the CLDR. Wherever the CLDR doesn’t provide a name (eg, “Medieval Latin”), the pattern followed in practice for other names is applied, namely, use the ‘natural’ form in English: medievallatin. They should be preferably based on the description field in the IANA registry (eg, polytonicgreek), although some simplifications can be necessary, because some names are “too” descriptive. See also the templates for about 500 locales already available. As a secondary source, Glottolog is used, too. (Wikipedia articles can be taken as a complementary but unreliable source, and its information must be verified; on the other hand, internal data, like this one, is useful for both names and tags.)

A few locales with a region or a script have in the CLDR a more precise name. For example, ro-MD is “Moldavian”. They will be normalized in babel in the next few releases.

Some others has compound names like American English or Norwegian Nynorks. In these cases, they might be shortened if the result is clear.

When there are ‘short’ additional names (without hyphens), prefer ‘plain’ demonyms (even if vernacular) over composed names (eg, british better than UKenglish). This reflects the evolution of the english style, because the names american and british predate USenglish and UKenglish. Further, the main names in the CLDR for en-US and en-GB are American English and British English. Note the names ukenglish and usenglish (all lowercase) are not supported by babel as ldf files, even if they work in some operating systems.

The following names are deprecated (use the name after the arrow):

Therefore, they are not included in name.babel. Some anomalous names (related to german and serbian) should be fixed in the future, but how to deal with them is under study.

Variants in the CLDR are uppercased, but in the BCP 47 registry they are lowercases (eg, el-polyton). We stick to the BCP 47 format.