Project 318 . Get Basic English recognized as a language, region, or variant in I18N standards.

    Scope
        Enter Basic English as an offical language "region", "variant" or "type". The active group seems to be the I18N project (OpenOffice,Sun,IBM) which is used by them and others (most all) including the FireFox browser which has 437 languages for download, so it can't be too hard to get a designation. We need a designation to recognize our spell checking and dictionary/translation/thesauris.
        The form to express a language is: language_REGION_variant
    Possiblities.
        Language is a two letter code such as "en" for English. Unless there were an international or universal category created, but that would no doubt called "other", 'Other" would probably get us grouped with "Klingon" and Esperanto., so lets lobby for "en" rather than fight to get "international" recognized.
        The "region" 2-digit field efffects things like currency and date indications where "US", "UK" are the most used. (example: do the symbols 03/04/05 represent a date of April 3 or March 4 in 2005 or is it the sensable (and sortable) 2003, April 5. These codes have political overtones -- charges of imperialism -- and we would rather have our own designation such as "BE". To become a regional language will cause us to adopt/specify some standards between Ogden's native UK and the "lingua franca" US. Humm. . .
        Assuming the region designations are fixed and inviolate, then a "variant" would have to be created for each country. The similarities far exceed the differences so the task would not be daunting. However, the "variant" field is less commonly seen and not all software looks for it. We would have to lobby hard for each software to make changes necessary to recognize us and that is daunting. This third designator field can be a short word : a variant name such as "basic" or "basiceng" might be suggestions.
        Type is another code, I don't know if that fits here or not.
    References :
       http://www.openi18n.org/subgroups/lade/locale/
       http://www.openi18n.org/spec/ldml/1.0/ldml-spec.htm
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    Last updated March 21, , 2004.
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