[Bug localedata/1015] There is a need for an alternative belarusian locale

["ihar.hrachyshka at gmail dot com" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1015

--- Comment #22 from booxter <ihar.hrachyshka at gmail dot com> 2010-11-06 13:15:25 UTC ---
Ok, let me show you that this language variant is quite strong to have its own
locale.

1. There are 2 (two) Belarusian Wikipedias: be.wikipedia.org (IANA:
be_BY-1959acad, be_BY in glibc) and be-x-old.wikipedia.org (IANA: be_BY-tarask)
with quite similar articles count: 24914 (be) vs. 29004 (be-x-old).

2. As for localisation, we have different open- and closed-source software
having either one or another language variant translations. F.e. OpenOffice,
Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE work with academic language variant
(be_BY-1959acad) though GNOME, Gimp, Xfce4 have tarashkevitsa (be_BY-tarask)
translation (the latter was forced to use be_BY locale till now because there
is no proper place for their contributions). Mediawiki and some other software
packages have both language versions translation.

3. As for real life, Belarusian Academy of Science, schools, state publishers
and media work in -1959acad version. Though some other popular media work in
alternative, -tarask version (mainly: Radio Liberty for Belarus, Radio Racyja,
ARCHE, some private publishers).

I don't know about any official statistics on the percentage of usage of each
of the variants but I think every Belarusian language user will support that
this percentage can vary (80/20 to 20/80 percentage in different spheres with
total stats of about 75/25 for -1959acad and -tarask respectively).

You can read a bit more on the roots of two language norm variants existance
on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraškievica

So this is not the case of "fringe variations plaguing glibc locale database."
:)

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