Is there a default locale for xml:lang="en"?

yoonshik · July 15, 2016

I've been reading through a few CSL formats trying to get a hang of it, and I noticed that MLA 8th edition uses the "en" locale code. It seems that this may be ambiguous because some terms in locales-en-US.xml, such as date, open-quote, etc., are defined differently from those in locales-en-GB.xml.

Question: If a CSL style uses the "en" locale code, which locale file does it use: locales-en-US.xml or locales-en-GB.xml? Is there a default locale for "en"?

Rintze · July 15, 2016

Is there a default locale for "en"?

Short answer: yes, "en-US".

Long answer:
There aren't any official rules for this as far as I know, but within CSL we use the "primary-dialect" listing as defined in https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/master/locales.json, where we specified "en-US" as the primary dialect for "en".

See also http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#locale-fallback, which says: "If the chosen output locale is a language (e.g. “de”), the (primary) dialect is used in step 1 (e.g. “de-DE”)."

yoonshik · July 15, 2016

@Rintze Ah, I missed that line. Thanks a lot! The primary-dialect dictionary is exactly what I was looking for.

adamsmith · July 19, 2016

The reason MLA uses "en" in the locale section, btw., is so that those modified terms, like the MLA-style month abbreviations, apply both for UK and US users, while other things (e.g. the placement of punctuation relative to quotation marks) are still determined by the specific locale the user has set.