Re: [Ietf-languages] Language subtag registration form

[Richard Wordingham <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, 9 Mar 2019 03:47:44 +0000
Peter Constable <petercon=[e-mail]> wrote:

> Now that there's convergence on a tag, how about this (emphasis
> added):
> 
> 4. Intended meaning of the subtag:
>      The Bornholmsk _language_, spoken on the Danish island of
> Bornholm, which has distinct grammar, lexicon, gender system and
> pronunciation when compared to Danish.
> 
> If the assertion is that this is a distinct language, then a variant
> subtag is not really appropriate, and the response should be that a
> request should first be redirected to the ISO 639-3 RA.
> 
> So, let me ask: Is the request really to code a distinct _language_,
> or should the description be revised to say "The Bornholmsk variety
> of Danish"?

There is an argument for calling it the "Bornholmsk" variety of
Scanian, but Scanian was stripped of its ISO 693-3 language status in
2009.

I see no evidence of an army or a navy, though the Danish armed forces
are probably good evidence that the local tongue of Bornholm is not a
dialect of Swedish.

It might be better to introduce it as the "Bornholmsk Scandinavian
dialect".  Is it true that it has the same orthography as Danish?
Could the interpretation of the locale usefully fall back to
standard Danish when there is no usable data for Bornholmsk?

Richard.