Middle East countries all missing country codes

[HackYaaaaa]

Currently, WordPress does not support country codes for any Middle East countries such as Qatar, UAE, or Saudi Arabia.

They are all lumped into one as "ar." There is no ar-QA, ar-AE, etc.

​https://wpcentral.io/internationalization/

This may not be an issue for a simple blog site but WordPress is increasingly being used for commercial applications and ecommerce sites now days.

I do realize that current WordPress internationalization scheme is based on language, not based on country.

This poses a serious inconvenience and added development cost for a business application that wishes to serve contents and services based on country, not language.

Let me illustrate one example. Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (in terms of population) does not have its own country code. So based on WordPress scheme of things, Nigeria has to be lumped with one of the six English codes WordPress provides since Nigeria's official language is English.

If "en" is chosen, Nigeria is then has to be grouped with many other countries that use English as their official language. What does Nigeria have in common with Tonga?

I am not making this proposal for our current needs. We have already implemented our custom router scheme to address this issue. But coming up with a solution wasn't easy. It certainly wasn't cheap.

I am pointing this out for other businesses and startups that will run into this issue in the future.

Regards,

Matthew S. Park
General Counsel & CTO
MM Global Services, Inc.

[tobifjellner]

Hi,

Our list of current locales depends mostly on what language teams we've got (or have had at some point in time). The full live list can be seen in ​https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/

Locales are sometimes a combination of a language code and a region/country. But not always.

If I understand you correctly, then you'd like WordPress core to offer the possibility to declare a manually entered locale in the HTML delivered to visitors and that this tag could be different than the locale setting, which defines which language package the site will use to create all pages.

[HackYaaaaa]

Replying to tobifjellner:

"Locales are sometimes a combination of a language code and a region/country. But not always." Yes, this arbitrary and inconsistent scheme to define "locales" is problematic. A language doesn't always define a country (Does Canada use English or French?) and the same English language can be used by multiple countries in different continents.

For the Chinese language, WordPress core has recognized and addressed this issue long time ago. Because Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have different business models, political system, and regulations, each region has its own assigned language and country code. And this WordPress scheme has met online business needs of these three regions quite well. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the whole African continent or the Middle East.

It's not that dozens of countries that use English as their official language need a separate translation team. They just need their own unique country code.

This really isn't a request that needs technical expertise or resource but a geopolitical awareness that there are distinct countries in Africa, Middle East and in other parts of the globe.

I just shared this info with a colleague from Nigeria and he found this to be quite hurtful. I am sure others may even find this lack of awareness by WordPress quite offensive.

Hi,

Our list of current locales depends mostly on what language teams we've got (or have had at some point in time). The full live list can be seen in ​https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/

Locales are sometimes a combination of a language code and a region/country. But not always.

If I understand you correctly, then you'd like WordPress core to offer the possibility to declare a manually entered locale in the HTML delivered to visitors and that this tag could be different than the locale setting, which defines which language package the site will use to create all pages.

[ocean90]

Hello @HackYaaaaa, welcome to WordPress Trac!

Please note that this Trac is only used for bugs and enhancements on the WordPress core software.

However, thanks for your feedback here. As already mentioned above, each current locale was requested by a person or team who/which wanted to maintain the locale and the translations. That’s also how we got some languages for multiple countries, like Spanish, German, or Chinese.

I‘m going to close this ticket as invalid since there are no actionable tasks for core currently. But I’d like to invite you to join the Polyglots team on ​https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/ and/or the ​Slack channel #polyglots to share any additional feedback. Thanks!