offensive use of 'English'

[Max Waterman]

I have been presented with a window 'Language Support' that lists 'Language for menus and windows:' and instructs me to 'Drag languages to arrange them in order of preference.

It lists these languages:

"
English (United Kingdom)
English
English (Australia)
"

I could claim that the first two entries are duplicates, but this would seem to be a case of using 'English' to mean the variant used in the USA. As I am English, I find this offensive since English is English - the UK contains several countries each with their own language. So, IMO, the correct list should be :

"
English
English (United States)
English (Australia)
"

However, I realise that is confusing to people from the United States and that they are likely the majority in terms of English (variant) speakers. The usual 'solution' is to always specify the variant, ie :

"
English (United Kingdom)
English (United States)
English (Australian)
"

Please consider making the fix.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: language-selector-gnome 0.34.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-11.48-generic-pae 2.6.38.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-11-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Aug 20 09:57:49 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-language-selector
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.7
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: language-selector
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-08-12 (7 days ago)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Hi Max,

Thanks for your help to make Ubuntu better by posting this observation.

Actually, the country _is_ specified for all the available English translation variants. On my box I see these items:

English (Australia)
English (Canada)
English (New Zeeland)
English (United Kingdom)
English (United States)

In addition to those menu items Language Support lists also an English only (i.e. without country) special item. The latter serves as a separator between languages that are included in the LANGUAGE environment variable and the other languages. Its purpose is not to mean "English as spoken in the US".

OTOH, if somebody selects the non-country English item, Ubuntu still has to pick a proper locale name to put into the LC_MESSAGES environment variable, and it's configured to pick en_US.UTF-8 in that case. The reason for not having it pick en_GB.UTF-8 is of a practical nature: en_US is assumed to be available on more computers worldwide than en_GB.

A similar topic was previously discussed at bug #710148, btw.

You may want to click the "Help" button from the Language Support window for a description of how Language Support is intended to work.

Considering the above explanation, I hope you agree that there is no obvious bug to fix.

[Max Waterman (davidmaxwaterman+launchpad)]

> Considering the above explanation, I hope you agree that there is no obvious bug to fix.

Indeed, I agree.

Thanks for your time.