GeoNames Forum

Carey Gister has helped fix some errors in the languages column of the countryInfo.txt file. As source for this fixes he used the CIA Factbook langauge data. The languages are ordered by the number of people who speak the language in this country.

The new language information is available as of todays dump.

Cheers

Marc

Thanks for the attribution, Marc. I was pleased to be able to contribute back to this great project.

I have one correction to your comment on how the languages are ordered. If there is an official language, or languages, then that language, or those languages, are first in the list.

For example, the CIA Fact Book mentions the languages for Lesotho in the following order:

Sesotho, English (official), Zulu, Xhosa.

I enumerated the languages as:

English, Sesotho, Zulu, Xhosa.

My thinking was that official languages, such as English, are likely to be understood by a large number of the internet using communities from those countries.

For countries where this is not an official language, the languages are enumerated in the order given in the CIA Fact Book.

I appempted to resolve all languages in the CIA Fact Book to the correct two or three letter ISO codes. I used your iso-languages.txt file for this purpose. Where I could not find a language, or their were multiple entries for a language and I could not determine which entry was intended, I omitted the language. Lastly, I did not resolve all languages to the XX-YY format that was predominate in the previous verstion of the file. I was not certain that the encoding was ISO LANGUAGE-ISO COUNTRY. If this is the case, then send me an email and I will submit a uniform version of the file.

Carey

Hi Carey

The format is languagecode-COUNTRYCODE.

It is following the xml recommandations and rfc3066 :

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-lang-tag
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt

Regards

Marc