What are BCP 47 language tags?
B Vinoth Raj
Jan 20, 2022
BCP 47 is the Internet Best Current Practices for language tags. These language tags are used to identify human languages in the Internet. For example
en-US
The language tag “en-US” is composed 2 subtags separated by the “-“ character. The value “en” is the language subtag for English and the value “US” is the region subtag for the United States. Therefore, the language tag “en-US” represents US English.
So what exactly is BCP?
You might have heard about RFCs maintained by IETF. Yes, the RFC (Request for Comments) are documents that defines Internet standards for many things like TCP, HTTP, Base64, CSS, and so on. The current IETF process has two types of RFCs: standards track document and other RFCs that are informational, experimental or FYIs.
Best Current Practices (described in RFC1818) are document guidelines, processes, methods, and other matters not suitable for standardization.
References:
Language Subtag Registry
BCP 47