LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM

(last updated 26 April 2005)

Name of requester          : Mark Davis
E-mail address of requester: mark.davis&us.ibm.com
Tag to be registered       : zh-Hant-CN
English name of language   : PRC Mainland Chinese in traditional script
Native name of language (transcribed into ASCII): zhong wen 
(fan ti zi, zhong guo)

Reference to published description of the language (book or article):

RFC 3066 currently provides for the language tag zh-CN, to mark any 
distinctions in the Chinese used in China.

However, Chinese is customarily written in multiple scripts, Traditional 
(Hant) and Simplified (Hans). It is often required, when matching languages, 
to select a subset of documents written in a particular script. When looking 
up language resources, this is even more important, so that text in different 
scripts is not mixed. For that reason, it is important to be able to distinguish 
the two scripts used in writing zh-CN: zh-Hant-CN vs zh-Hans-CN.

References:

Ramsey, S. Robert. The Languages of China. Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1987. Paper. ISBN: 0-691-01468-X

Wang, W. S-Y. Languages and Dialects of China. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 
Monograph Series No. 3. Berkeley: Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1991

DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact And Fantasy. Honolulu: 
University of Hawaii Press, 1984. Paper. ISBN: 0-8248-1068-6

Chao, Yuen Ren. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1968. ISBN: 0-520-00219-9.

Kratochvil, Paul. The Chinese Language Today: features of an emerging standard. 
London: Hutchinson, 1968.

Boltz, William G. The Origin and Development of the Chinese Writing System. 
Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1994. ISBN: 0-940490-78-1

(created 26 April 2005)