BCP47 Picker

A flexible language picker

There is a great standard that helps with specifing the language of anything. It is called BCP47. Maybe you have seen en-US or de-AT somewhere. These are BCP47 tags. The great thing is that nl is also a valid tag, but also something like: drt-x-his9414. The last one is a dutch dialect called North Drents, which extends the language drt.

I personally did not know that Drents itself was seen as a language, and it might be not totally valid. It might be better to use: nl-x-his9414 Anyway these language tags are very useful for tagging media. You can get all media that is Dutch (nl) but also fetch the narrowed down media: x-his9414.

What is this x-? This a part that is called private use. And the his1234 part is made up by the folks of HIS. HIS is a Christian organization that tries to identify all the languages and language variaties in the world. A language variety might be a dialect, or a language that not yet has been identified as a full language.

To help tagging media I created bcp47-picker. It is also available to use with your own software. It is also possible to plug in your own language codes or standards.