Adding a new locale language on OJS for a language without an ISO 639-1 code

Software Support
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Hi folks,

We publish articles in several Sami languages, two of which (Åarjelsaemien gïele, or Southern Sami; and Julevsámegiella, or Lule Sami) do not have a 2-letter ISO 639-1 code.

Best practice when setting up a new locale language in such cases would be to use the 3-letter ISO 639-2 codes (yielding sma_NO and smj_NO). This works fine in OJS (3.3.0.7) until we come to press Install Locale. We get a message that selected languages have been successfully installed, but they never actually appear in the list of installed languages.

In a thread from 2016, the advice when dealing with languages without an ISO 639-1 code was to use a “wrong”, unused 2-letter code. This is the approach we have taken for the time being, but it is far from optimal (for example, it causes problems with export of metadata).

Has there been any headway with resolving this issue more successfully since 2016? Or is the advice still to use the “wrong” language code?

We are very keen to work towards minoritized languages being treated properly!

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Hi @huw,

We’re keen to support this better too!

We’re about to release OJS 3.4.0 (within days), and have made some improvements in this regard. OJS/OMP/OPS up to 3.3.0 had a very strict xx_YY[@charset] locale code pattern, and we’ve relaxed that to better support generic locale codes (e.g. en for English instead of en_US, which has always chafed as a Canadian project).

I hadn’t considered xxx_YY locale codes in the process, but off the top of my head, you should be in better shape with 3.4.0 just by nature of removing some of the assumptions about locale codes that were present before this release.

I would suggest waiting for 3.4.0 to be released and giving it a try. If you’re able to report back on your results, I may be able to push a little further on improvements to accommodate your use case.

Edited to add: Weblate (which we use for translation management) uses sma for “Sami (Southern)” and smj for “Sami (Lule)”. Weblate tends to follow good practices and we’re taking our cues on locale codes from there lately. Would these suit you?

Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Hi @asmecher,

Terrific; thanks for this update. We’ll be sure to report back after the 3.4.0 release.

And yes, we’d be following Weblate’s practice here: sma for Southern Sami and smj for Lule Sami.

Many thanks,
Huw Grange
Septentrio Academic Publishing

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