Draft
For the naming of the locales at the user level, the following conventions are used.
Languages, and therefore the corresponding files, are named with the
English name, lowercased and without spaces: northernkurdish.
Diacritics and non-letters are just removed (lu for “Lü”, kinaraya
for “Kinaray-a”, bosniaherzegovina for “Bosnia & Herzegovina”). Other
fields, like script and region, are separated with hyphens:
serbian-latin, spanish-mexico. Some regions may have long names
(eg, bosniaherzegovina), so, for convenience, the corresponding code
is also allowed (ba, in this case).
They are taken from the CLDR. Wherever the CLDR doesn’t provide a name
(eg, “Medieval Latin”), the pattern followed in practice for other
names is applied, namely, use the ‘natural’ form in English:
medievallatin. They should be preferably based on the description
field in the
IANA
registry (eg, polytonicgreek), although some simplifications can be
necessary, because some names are “too” descriptive. See also the
templates
for about 500 locales already available.
A few locales with a region or a script have in the CLDR a more precise
name. For example, ro-MD is “Moldavian”. They will be normalized in
babel in the next few releases.
When there are ‘short’ additional names (without hyphens), prefer
‘plain’ demonyms (even if vernacular, like canadien) over composed
names (eg, british better than UKenglish). This reflects the
evolution of the english style, because the names american and
british predate USenglish and UKenglish. Note the names
ukenglish and usenglish (all lowercase) are not supported by
babel, even if they work in some operating systems.
The following names are deprecated: brazil (for brazilian),
bahasai (for indonesian), bahasam (for malay), frenchb (for
french) lsorbian (for lowersorbian), newzealand, portuges
[sic] (for portuguese), usorbian (for uppersorbian), vietnam
(for vietnamese), russianb (for russian). Therefore, they are not
included in name.babel. Some anomalous names (related to german and
serbian) should be fixed in the future, but how to deal with them is
under study.