Re: [Wikimedia-BD] 'Bangla', 'Bengali' and the International Standards

I am changing the subject title to keep this discussion under correct heading. This very thing has bugged me for a long time and I gave it some more intense thoughts and a little research. Here I am not trying to preach about what is 'Right' and what is 'Wrong', rather I am just presenting facts I have discovered and what are my thought on this matter for further discussion. I will try to keep it as short as possible. According to the Eighth Amendment of the constitution of Peoples Republic of Bangladesh, Section 3 reads, "The state language of the Republic is Bangla"[1]. So, it's clear that Bangladesh has officially declared the language should be spelled as 'Bangla'. And we are bound to use 'Bangla' as every official documents and so on. Bangla is not only spoken in Bangladesh. Bangla is also spoken in least 3 major regions; West Bengal, Tripura, Assam (Barak valley), Andaman and Nicobar Islands. [2] There is a lot of other people around the world also speaks Bangla as well. When we are talking about Bangla in Bangladesh, it's fairly simple. But it have an international context, situation is different. ISO (International Organization of Standardization)[3] is the body responsible for setting international standards. People follow ISO standards on International matters regardless of their domestic practice (i.e. some countries use 'Mile' as domestic unit of length, but also use 'Kilometer' when international matters involved) and this is the commonly accepted manner. ISO has set up a list of language and their universal codes for it, which are widely accepted by the UN countries. On 'ISO 639-1' standards[4] a two-letter code was adopted and 'ISO 639-2' [5] adopted a three-letter code. For 'Bengali' which are 'bn' and 'ben' respectively. [6] On this coding system, some language have had initials of their original form/spelling of their language. Like, Persian. 'Persian' is the English name of 'Farsi'. Persian has language codes like 'fa' and 'far'. On 'ISO 639-2/T' it adopted the three letters from the English name of the Language, 'per'. Same thing happened to German and French ('German', 'Deutsch', 'de', 'deu', 'ger' and 'French', 'français', 'fr', 'fra','fre'). [6] These ISO codes are also widely used on field of IT. Systems recognize languages with their English names than their native names. This is mainly because of that a non 'German' speaker doesn't wonder about what 'Deutsch' is. This rule was applied universally for all the languages. And under this rule, 'Bangla' became 'Bengali', just like 'Français' became 'French'. So, the thing is, when we are using 'Bangla' for our domestic use, 'Bangla' is the correct (bound by the constitution) spelling for 'Bangla'. But when we are talking international matters, it should be 'Bengali' for more practical and logical reasons. Ref: ----- [1] http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/sections_detail.php?id=367&sections_id=24550 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-2 [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes --- Shabab Mustafa On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Aditya <aditya(a)asiaticjwt.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-BD mailing list Wikimedia-BD(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-bd