The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 5 (...until the decision was made to not refuse to add it)

Previous blogs from this series:

• part 0 (The introduction)
• part 1 (Some people don't want to double-d's)
• part 2 (raising the roof on keyboards) 
• part 3 (working beyond one's bugs, the setup) 
• part 4 (working beyond one's bugs, and the case for an MSKLC update)

So after going way off-topic in the last part, I thought I'd come back to the reservation.

Ready?

Every version of Windows -- plus XP SP2 and XP SP3 -- has added new locales.

We've never taken any out, once they've shipped.

And we've only ever removed four sorts (described in Four exceptions to prove the rule).

Anyway, so it is hardly breaking news that we added locales in Windows 8.

The full list we've added (already mentioned at the IUC35) is:

• Central Kurdish (Arabic) - Iraq
• Cherokee (Cherokee) - United States
• Fulah (Latin) - Senegal
• Hawaiian - United States
• Punjabi (Arabic) - Pakistan
• Setswana - Botswana
• Sindhi (Arabic) - Pakistan
• Tamil - Sri Lanka
• Tigrinya - Ethiopia
• Tigrinya - Eritrea
• Valencian - Spain

This is a very interesting list, for several reasons, one of which is the wide differences in reasons each one was added.

In particular, there are several here that I am quite pleased about, all of which I recused myself most of the justification conversations because I was personally rooting for them and didn't want an inappropriate bias to take away from my advocacy...

Now these aren't UI languages mind you -- these are just locales -- though as I pointed out earlier, locales are huge. It takes your breath away the first time you see your locale on the Standards and Formats list -- I know because I've witnessed it several times over the years (more on this another time).

So they are cool on their on, and I'll give part of the list of why I think a few of them are especially cool:

There is Central Kurdish (Arabic) - Iraq, which allowed me to be proven wrong about my earlier statements almost 2.5 years ago in The Whey doesn't get a locale, either.

And there is Tamil - Sri Lanka, which allows me to be a part of keeping ~1/3 of my promises about Tamil locales in Windows.

And there is Hawaiian (United States), which I despondently assumed would never be added, for no reason I could fathom, until the decision was made to not refuse to add it....

For the record, I'll say that Shawn Steele's advocacy of Hawaiian was a definite factor in its approval -- at the point where we asked about it, we were past the point of expecting to succeeed; we were like the Chicago Cubs (assuming we already lost), which made the approval all the more sweet!

There is more here that is interesting and fun, which I'll be covering in future parts of the series....