Support \foreignlanguage{austrian}{…} and friends

[njbart]

It’s great that polyglossia supports the babel syntax, too. Some of the language variants, however, do not work as expected. E.g.,

\foreignlanguage{english}{\today} and \foreignlanguage{german}{\today} work.

\foreignlanguage{british}{\today} and \foreignlanguage{austrian}{\today} don’t (no output at all).

[meisterluk]

I attach my issue here because I think the issue is about the general support of Austrian language in polyglossia.

Consider the following MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,lipsum,polyglossia}
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}
\setdefaultlanguage{austrian}

\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
  \begin{center}
    \fbox{\hbox{\hspace{40pt}HI\hspace{40pt}}}%
  \end{center}
  \caption{Hier sollte ``Abbildung 1'' davor stehen}
\end{figure}

\section{Erstens}
\lipsum[1]

\section{Zweitens}
\lipsum[2-4]

\end{document}

Even though I declared Austrian as default language (same for "mainlanguage"), the caption title is "Figure", hence in English language. But Austrian is a german dialect and should inherits its definition of the caption title "Abbildung" (\setdefaultlanguage{german} works nicely).

As far as I can see the problem can be fixed by defining \captions@austrian in polyglossia.dtx where \captions@austrian inherits definitions of \captions@german.

best regards,
an Austrian

[jspitz]

@meisterluk, you have to use

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,lipsum,polyglossia}
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=austrian]{german}% <-- LOOK HERE

\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
  \begin{center}
    \fbox{\hbox{\hspace{40pt}HI\hspace{40pt}}}%
  \end{center}
  \caption{Hier sollte ``Abbildung 1'' davor stehen}
\end{figure}

\section{Erstens}
\lipsum[1]

\section{Zweitens}
\lipsum[2-4]

\end{document}

See polyglossia manual. The feature request here is to introduce austrian as an alias for that, to have some compatibility with babel, which does not differentiate languages and varieties on the syntax level. Same for other language varieties.

[jspitz]

Vice versa, I think it would be a good idea to provide a command \babelname or somesuch that returns the babel name for the current language (variety) (or \empty if babel does not have a counterpart).

This would make it easier for external packages (such as biblatex) I think.

[jspitz]

It’s great that polyglossia supports the babel syntax, too. Some of the language variants, however, do not work as expected. E.g.,

\foreignlanguage{english}{\today} and \foreignlanguage{german}{\today} work.

\foreignlanguage{british}{\today} and \foreignlanguage{austrian}{\today} don’t (no output at all).

One problem here is that there are overlapping language names: german in babel is not the same as german in polyglossia. The former is in polyglossia [spelling=old,variant=german]. So at least this case needs to be excluded.
Apart from that, it would be possible now to provide alias commands and environments based on the babel names.

[jspitz]

As of v1.46, all babel names can be used as aliases (except for, obviously, german; here, we provide babel's own alias, germanb, as an alternative).