A new language requst: zh-TW

[12cassie34]

Hello language lovers, (Language here refers to whether(or both) programming languages or natural languages. 🚀)

First of all, thanks for creating and maintaining this great repo. My colleagues and I love it!

I'm wondering if it's possible for me to contribute a new language which its code is 'zh-TW'(Traditional Chinese).

I know that zh-TW doesn't exist on the list of ISO 639-1, but that's the official language of Republic of China(Taiwan) which means that it's used by more than 24,000,000 people.

People might wonder what's the difference between zh and zh-TW, is it really necessary to add zh-TW. Well, the two languages are very different from each other, for example

1. The characters are different:

   en	zh	zh-TW
   Finnish	芬兰语	芬蘭語
   Malay	马来语	馬來語

2. The translations of languages between zh and zh-TW may be different, when it comes to:

   • Azerbaijani: we say "亞塞拜然語" instead of "阿塞拜疆语".
   • Lao: we say "高棉語" instead of "老挝语".
   • Kinyarwanda: we say "盧安達語" instead of "卢旺达语".
   • Venda: we say "溫達語" instead of "文达语". ... etc

I'm ready to contribute but instead of pulling a request, I think it's better to have a conversation to discuss about this beforehand. Since it's an open source repo 🙂.

Thanks for reading!

[e110c0]

While I understand the reasoning behind this, the idea of this library is to provide ISO 639 language code translations. For one thing, zh-TW is a IETF language tag, and as you mentioned, is not reflected in ISO 639.

I don't see how this can be done in a consistent way for this library, because there is no 2 letter or (for ISO 639-2/3) 3 letter code for this language.

so this either means breaking completely with ISO 639, nor adding full IETF language tag support, with the side effect that not all languages will be represented in both IETF and ISO-639.

I think this is out of scope of this library at this moment

[12cassie34]

Hello Got it! Yes, I can totally understand the idea of this library. Thanks for replying me anyway🙂.