Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Aldo Donetti asked me the other day:
Hi Michael, I’m sure you’ve seen it [the new RFC 4646 for language tags/subtags] already. Do you think it’s going to be implemented soon in Windows/CLR (maybe we already do and I just don’t know…)
Ah yes, good old RFC 4646 (Tags for Identifying Languages) and its sister RFC 4647 (Matching of Language Tags).
As for when Windows and the CLR will support them, they actually support them now! :-)
Of course, the name of the RFC (or even the split) was not known at the time and it took them a while to get this RFC through the whole process, which is why so many doc topics (like this one and this one and so on) have text referring to RFC 3066(bis), which was the working name for the update until the new number was issued.
But support is in there now (and a few names were actually updated to fix inconsistencies and other problems, as Kieran mentioned here), and I am sure at some point the documentation will be fixed (after which this post will seem to be broken, of course!).
Though several were unhappy that we referenced the RFC before it was final, the reality is that Whidbey had to ship and the delays in the RFC were really not something for which the .NET Framework (or VS 2005 or SQL Server) could be delayed. So those people had to just get over it.... :-)
In any case, the work has happened to make sure that RFC 4646 is something that we support!
This post brought to you by છ (U+09ab, a.k.a. GUJARATI LETTER CHA)
Somebody asked me the other day about a post from Language Log that Bill Poser wrote entitled Standardizing
(Apologies to Roger Ebert, whose book I parodied for the sake of this blog post was a wonderful and not