[Ltru] Countries and languages (Was: New scripts

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 10:54:07AM -0800,
 Mark Davis <mark.davis@icu-project.org> wrote 
 a message of 87 lines which said:

> The reason that the political divisions are often useful in
> discriminating among language variants is that there are often
> common linguistic features that are associated with those political
> entities.

I suspect that it is true only for Europe. In Africa, at least,
countries are quite meaningless, linguistically speaking. It seems too
easy to find a lot of counter-examples where the country does not give
any indication on the variant spoken or written (what is es-US, for
instance?)

The idea to have countries in language tags (not in locales, where
things like currencies and holidays obviously depend on the country)
is questionable and seems to come from a traditional "Nation-State"
mind.

(Of course, in the name of stability, I do not suggest that we drop
them, just that we keep in mind that they are most often not a good
discriminant for languages.)

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