Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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As an Irish person, while we have en_IE which is great (and solves most of the problems you list re: Euro-centric defaults + English), I'd still quite like to have an even more broad / trans-language / "cosmopolitan" locale to use.

I mainly type in English but occasionally other languages - I use a combination of Mac & Linux - macOS has an (off-by-default but enable-able) lang-changer icon in the tray that is handy enough, but still annoying to have to toggle. Linux is much worse.

Mac also has quite a nice long-press-to-select-special character that at least makes for accessible (if not efficient) typing in multiple languages while using an English locale. Mobile keyboards pioneered this (& Android's current one even does simultanous multi-lang autocomplete, though it severely hurts accuracy).

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> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects.

I think you'll find the opposite to be true. US English spellings & conventions are quite a departure from other dialects, so typing fluidly & naturally in any non-US dialect is going to net you a world of autocorrect pain in en_US. To the extent it renders many potentially essential spelling & grammar checkers completely unusable.

I write in multiple languages daily on Linux, including English, Russian, and Chinese. Switching keyboards (at least with gnome) is a simple super-space.

While in my default (English) layout, it is easy enough to add in accents other characters using the compose key (right alt). So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü. I much prefer this over the long press as I can do it quickly and seamlessly without having to wait on feedback. Granted, it is not as discoverable, but once you are comfortable, it in my opinion is a better system.

> So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü.

Not for me!

Right-alt+'+a = â

Right-alt+'+u = û

I can 2nd this as an American who now resides in Europe. My first laptop I brought with me, and was defaulted to en_US, but my replacement is en_GB (Apple doesn't have en_NL, for good reason).

I don't find it "unusable", though. I could change it back to en_US, but it has actually been interesting to see all of my American spellings flagged by autocorrect. Each time I write authorize instead of authorise it is an act of stubborn group affinity!

> US English spellings & conventions are quite a departure from other dialects.

As far as the written, formal language is concerned, English really has only three dialects: US American, Canadian, and everywhere else. There are some other subtle differences (such as "robots" for traffic lights in South Africa, or "minerals" for fizzy drinks in Ireland¹), but that's pretty much it.

¹ Yes, this isn't just slang in Ireland: the formal, pre-recorded announcements on trains use it: "A trolley service will operate to your seat, serving tea, coffee, minerals and snacks." The corresponding Irish announcement renders it mianraí. Food service on trains stopped during covid and has not yet resumed, so I'm working from distant memory now.

> As far as the written, formal language is concerned, English really has only three dialects

This is true, but I don't see why the "formal" qualifier is needed here :) There are much more than 3 dialects of English, both written & spoken.

Especially there's a fair few extremely common notable differences in (casual, written) Irish English: the word "amn't" (among other less common contractions), the alternative present tense of the verb "to be" (i.e. "do be"), various regional plurals of "you", and - perhaps the most common - prepositional pronouns, etc. etc.

Well, quite. If we include any one or more of the following three categories — formal spoken language, informal spoken language, informal written language — then there's definitely far more than three dialects of English. But formal spoken language really has only the three.

I guess it's a question as to how many varieties of spelling you want to make available as "translations" in software (e.g. color vs colour, tire vs tyre).

There's plenty of regional variants just within the US, but "en_us" covers the whole country.

That's a fair point - even in tiny tiny Ireland there's many regional dialects, with larger countries there'll typically be far more.

I guess the simple answer to that is: how much interest is there in maintenance. I don't think there's any compelling reason not to create something: if there's insufficient interest in maintenance that's an imperfect but reasonable proxy for utility.

I'm not aware of any maintained en_US_Xyz languages but it might be pretty cool if someone started. There's precedence in a few other languages, like no_NO_NY, zh_Hans_HK, etc.

For both Norwegian and Chinese there are two separate written standards, along with the far more varied spoken dialects/languages.

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