TpacBadges

The TPAC badges this year provide a blank space where participants can indicate languages they speak. The intent is that other attendees who have difficulties communicating in English can identify speakers of their language to seek clarification.

The i18n Working Group suggests that you might want to try using BCP 47 language tags to identify your language. If you'd like to try this, here are some simple instructions.

A language tag is composed of one or more subtags separated by hyphens. You always start by choosing a language subtag, and often this is all you'll need for your language tag.

*To find subtags for your TPAC badge, we recommend using the Language Subtag Lookup web app[1].*

Use the Find dialog box to search for your language. For example, if you search for French you will get back a list of subtags, of different types, with French in their description. Look under Language Codes for the subtag that fits best – usually fr.

For TPAC you can ignore extlang or script subtags, but you may want to use a region tag. For example, if you are from Quebec you might want to write fr-CA on your label, where CA is the region tag for Canada. (Use Find again to search for Canada and select the subtag from the Geographic Regions section.)

Always bear in mind that the golden rule is to keep your language tag as short as possible. Only add further subtags to your language tag if they are needed to distinguish the language from something else in the context where your language is used. For example, en-GB might be a useful distinction for spell-checking, but the region subtag in ja-JP is unlikely to be useful unless you are intentionally contrasting it with Japanese as spoken in other parts of the world.

For more detailed information about how BCP 47 tags work, see Language tags in HTML and XML[2] and the companion article Choosing a Language Tag[3]. You can also ask a member of the Internationalization Working Group if you have questions.

[1] https://r12a.github.io/app-subtags/

[2] https://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/

[3] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-language-tags