What’s new in babel 3.89

2023-05-11

Modifiers

About 10 years ago, a special syntax was devised to pass options to languages, with a dot-separated list in the following way:

spanish.notilde.lcroman

It was short and clean, but it has a severe disadvantage, namely, it’s problematic with languages set as class options. Therefore, this version introduces an alternative way to set the modifiers for a language, as the following example shows:

\documentclass[spanish]{report}
\usepackage[modifiers.spanish = notilde.lcroman]{babel}

That is, start a package options with modifiers. followed by the language, and then set the modifiers list. Note the language is not selected or loaded with this option.

Deprecations

\aliasshorthands is now deprecated because it was used very rarely and yielded some unexpected results.

\SetCase is deprecated because with a recent change in the LaTeX kernal it doesn’t any more (an alternative is on the way).

Cleaning up some language names

northernsami is the preferred name for samin, which is deprecated (it was clearly shortened to fit in the 8-character limit, and furthermore the Samin are a Javanese people).

scottishgaelic is the preferred name for scottish; the latter still makes sense (it’s parallel to irish, another Goidelic language), and therefore, although discouraged, is not deprecated.

acadian is listed sometimes as a synonymous for canadien, but it’s in fact a variety of French spoken mainly in New Brunswick. Currently, babel-french support only the names french and acadien, and babel new reflects this scheme. The former has the BCP 47 tag fr and the latter fr-x-acadian. (Wikipedia provides fr-u-sd-canb, literally ‘French as spoken in the Canadian subregion of New Brunswick’, but it’s in fact also spoken in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, among other subregions. Since no official source has been found, a descriptive tag has been chosen.)

See also Locale naming.

Documentation

Now there are two PDF files: babel.pdf is the user guide, and babel-code.pdf is the code. By default, running babel.dtx generates only the user guide.