Unicode Control Characters - Language Tags

Language Tags

Unicode includes 128 characters for language tags. These characters essentially mirror the 128 ASCII characters but are used to identify the subsequent text as belonging to a particular language according to BCP 47. For example, to indicate subsequent text as the variant of English as written in the United States, the initiating ‘Language Tag character’ (U+E0001) followed by the sequence ‘Tag Small Letter e’ (U+E0065), ‘Tag Small Letter n’ (U+E006E), ‘Tag Hyphen-minus’ (U+E002D), ‘Tag Small Letter u’ (U+E0075) and ‘Tag Small Letter s’ (U+E0073) would be used.

These language tag characters would not be displayed themselves. However, they would provide information for text processing or even for the display of other characters. For example the display of Unihan ideographs might substitute different glyphs if the language tags indicated Korean than if the tags indicated Japanese. Another example, might influence the display of decimal digits 0 through 9 differently depending on the language they appeared in.

The tag characters have become deprecated in Unicode 5.1 (2008).

Read more about this topic:  Unicode Control Characters

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