Re: [Ietf-languages] Fwd: Proposal for variant language subtags for German dialects

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

In my opinion:

For the Central and Upper German varieties, you don't make clear whether
you are talking about the various Mundarten (e.g. Austrobavarian)  or their
counterpart regionalects of Standard German (e.g. Austrian and Bavarian
Standard German respectively).  If the former, you should probably apply to
the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority to get 3-letter language tags
assigned, at least for as many varieties as are clearly not mutually
intelligible with each other or with Standard German.  This is a slower
process but produces a result more in line with the rest of the world's
languages.

Varieties that are not separated from Standard German by mutually
unintelligibility should have the kind of tags you have used, although I
recommend using "deu" as a prefix rather than the obsolescent "ger".

My understanding is that Low German is (still) a dialect continuum, and so
it is appropriate to use variant tags beginning with "nds".  High and
Highest Alemannic variant tags should be prefixed with "gsw".  Whether Low
Alemannic should also have "gsw" is a question.