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I'm confused by this: http://tug.org/tex-hyphen/#languages

There is a " en-gb", meaning "English in Great Britain", a "en-us", meaning "English in the USA"... but there is no "English in Australia" or "English in Ireland".

There is one called "ga" which apparently means "Irish", but is that the language "Irish" in... nowhere? Isn't "Irish" English in Ireland? So is that "en-GA", then? Why isn't it called that? Also, "ga" is the TLD/country code for Gabon according to Wikipedia. Not Ireland.

"Australia" is not mentioned anywhere on that entire page.

I'm just utterly confused by that whole page. I'm trying to make sure that I can use the hyphenation rules for each combination of "English + location", preferably "language + location", but it seems that it only has a very small number of combinations... two different ones for English?

I feel like I must be missing something important.

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    What you're missing is that it's a list of languages supported by one Tex library, not a general list of languages, so you shouldn't expect everything to be there. – curiousdannii Jan 18 '20 at 13:28
  • The code en-us denotes the variety of English (en) spoken in the USA (us). There is no need to distinguish between varieties of Irish; you could say ga-ie, in case. As for Irish English, it would be en-ie (language code-country code), but there is no set of patterns for this variety. – egreg Jan 18 '20 at 16:44
  • You might find this question interesting. – barbara beeton Jan 20 '20 at 20:15

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The language codes are from ISO 639; the country codes are from ISO 3166. What I haven't found is whether there is a standardised list of combinations of language and country. Here is a list from a translating company, but I don't know if the combinations are defined in a standard anywhere.

You see that besides the common en-us and en-gb, there are en-au, en-nz, en-in, en-ie and others: it sounds as if TEX has chosen just a couple of these.

The Irish language (also called Gaelic, or in Irish Gailige) is utterly, utterly different from Irish English.

Edit: the combination of language and country seems to be (part of) an IETF language tag; but while that Wikipedia article seems to point to an official IANA list of subtags, the list - the only one I can find among IANA's resources - is ludicrously incomplete and pretty random. (The only en- tags it includes are en-CA, en-GB-oed, en-GB-oxendict, en-boont and en-scouse).

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