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Comment by TRiG_Ireland | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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