@inproceedings{gillis-webber-tittel-2020-framework,
    title = "A Framework for Shared Agreement of Language Tags beyond {ISO} 639",
    author = "Gillis-Webber, Frances  and
      Tittel, Sabine",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      B{\'e}chet, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric  and
      Blache, Philippe  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Cieri, Christopher  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Goggi, Sara  and
      Isahara, Hitoshi  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Mazo, H{\'e}l{\`e}ne  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = may,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2020.lrec-1.408/",
    pages = "3333--3339",
    language = "eng",
    ISBN = "979-10-95546-34-4",
    abstract = "The identification and annotation of languages in an unambiguous and standardized way is essential for the description of linguistic data. It is the prerequisite for machine-based interpretation, aggregation, and re-use of the data with respect to different languages. This makes it a key aspect especially for Linked Data and the multilingual Semantic Web. The standard for language tags is defined by IETF{'}s BCP 47 and ISO 639 provides the language codes that are the tags' main constituents. However, for the identification of lesser-known languages, endangered languages, regional varieties or historical stages of a language, the ISO 639 codes are insufficient. Also, the optional language sub-tags compliant with BCP 47 do not offer a possibility fine-grained enough to represent linguistic variation. We propose a versatile pattern that extends the BCP 47 sub-tag `privateuse' and is, thus, able to overcome the limits of BCP 47 and ISO 639. Sufficient coverage of the pattern is demonstrated with the use case of linguistic Linked Data of the endangered Gascon language. We show how to use a URI shortcode for the extended sub-tag, making the length compliant with BCP 47. We achieve this with a web application and API developed to encode and decode the language tag."
}