What’s new in babel 25.2

2025-01-25

I’m preparing a collection of short videos here: LaTeX – Localization and multilingual. At the moment there are five, on Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, pure Unicode strings and Indic languages with lazy loading.

RTL scripts

The list of RTL scripts has been updated:

• AL (Arabic-like scripts): Arabic, Syriac, Thaana, Hanifi Rohingya, Hanifi, Sogdian.

• R (RTL scripts): Adlam, Avestan, Chorasmian, Cypriot, Elymaic, Garay, Hatran, Hebew, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Kharoshthi, Lydian, Mandaic, Manichaean, Mende Kikakui, Meroitic Cursive, Meroitic Hieroglyphs, Nabataean, Nko, Old Hungarian, Old North Arabian, Old Sogdian, Old South Arabian, Old Turkic, Old Uyghur, Palmyrene, Phoenician, Psalter Pahlavi, Samaritan, Yezidi, Mandaean, Meroitic, N’Ko, Orkhon, Todhri.

Note some scripts have duplicated names, because sources don’t agree. This won’t hurt.

Locales

There are a couple of new bare minimum locales:

• algerianarabic, with tag arq, also known as Darija or Lahja Djazairia, and different from Standard Arabic as spoken in Alger, with tag ar-DZ.
• olduighur(note the name is with ‘i’, because it’s the form in BCP 47).

Fixed a caption in Welsh.

Fixes

\BCPdata{tag} raised an error. Note the user command in babel to retrieve the locale info is \localeinfo.