Variants of language

Language variation, also called language or speech variation, language or speech variation. Language variation is an important topic in sociolinguistic research. Richard Hudson defines language variation as "a group of terms with similar social distribution". Meaning is a language expression commonly used by people with the same social characteristics in the same social environment. "Language variety" is a very broad concept, ranging from various dialects of a language to certain phonetic, lexical or syntactic features in dialects. As long as there is a certain social distribution, it is a language variant. The diversity of language is restricted by complex social factors. Sociolinguistics generally believes that the social class and style of the speaker are the important basis of language variation, and the gender of the speaker also has an important influence on language variation. Variants classified according to users are called dialects, and variants classified according to language use are called genres or registers. How to accurately express language variants

Faced with such a variety of language varieties, how can we ensure an objective and accurate description without ambiguity? Of course, with the common sense of each of us, we can't just scream. In fact, there is a standard ISO system in the world to regulate this expression.

Usually, we can use the unique combination of two sets of ISO codes to represent any specific language variety: one is ISO 639- 1 language code, that is, the combination of two lowercase letters to represent a unique language category; The other group is ISO 3 166- 1 alpha-2 country and region code, which is composed of two capital letters, indicating a unique country and region. For example, the two language codes of English are "en", and the country and region codes of the United States and Britain are "US" and "GB" respectively, so the corresponding American English and British English are represented by code combinations as "en-US" and "en-GB".

ISO system adopting international standards can accurately and uniquely express any specific language variety, which has always been a common practice and standard in professional fields such as language service and software localization.

Don't use the national flag to represent language

Although the above-mentioned way of using code combinations to represent specific language branches is widely used in professional fields, it is easier for ordinary audience users to accept intuitive and easy-to-understand display methods. The common way is to express it in the native form of each language.