7.2. Sounds Greek to me—theory of language detection

As discussed in chapter 4, the ability to consistently name and classify things is essential for fully understanding them. There are thousands of languages in the world, many with multiple dialects or regional variants. Some of the languages are extinct and some are artificial. Some don’t even have names in English! Others, like Chinese, have names whose specific meaning is highly context-sensitive.^[2] A standard taxonomy that can name and classify all languages is needed to allow information systems to reliably store and process information about languages.

^[2] The Chinese language people normally refer to is Standard Mandarin, the official language of China and Taiwan. But Chinese is a complex family of related languages that span vast demographic, geographic, and historic spaces, though most of them share at least variations of the same written form. For example, the Chinese you hear in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Macau is Cantonese, a dialect that’s about as far from Mandarin as German or French is from English.

There are a number of different increasingly detailed systems for categorizing and naming languages, their dialects, and other variants. For example, according to the RFC 5646: Tags for Identifying Languages standard, you could use de-CH-1996 to identify the form of German used in Switzerland after the spelling reform of 1996. Luckily there aren’t many practical applications where such detail is necessary or even desirable, so we’ll focus on just the de part of this identifier.