Session5:  "how to denote language and dialect" question discussion

We will recommend considering the use of two attributes (as opposed to
the one in SSML 1.0 today) for the language in SSML:

1) One attribute will identify the written script that is present in the
document.  xml:lang serves this role today in other W3C specifications
and would be appropriate for SSML as well.  It allows the processor to
know how to properly interpret characters in the text.  Example:
xml:lang=3D"zh-cmn-Hans-CN" means simplified Chinese (Han) characters as
written in mainland China.

2) The other attribute will identify the intended language for
rendering.  This is not intended to be used as a way to translate from
one language to another - rather, it is a way to suggest to the
processor how the content should be rendered.  This is particularly
useful for written scripts such as Han which can be spoken quite
differently if the rendering language changes from Mandarin to Cantonese
to Japanese, for example.  A possible such attribute might be
"spoken-as", for example, 'spoken-as=3D"zh-cmn-CN-a-guandong" to =
represent
speaking the text as a Mandarin speaker from mainland China with a
Guandong accent might speak it.

Note that it might be more appropriate to represent the accent
separately with yet another attribute such as "accent".

-- dan