UTW 2026

Tutorial
Internationalization ICU/CLDR

Macrolanguages, what is a language and not a language

Conrad Nied

on  Day2, 11:30in  for  90min

Often we group languages into macrolanguages like Chinese (zh), Malay (my) and Cree (cr). Depending on the context it is useful to have these groupings. However their constituent languages are often not mutually intelligible and in can cause communities to reject translations and services translated too broadly. We will discuss language families, dialects, and all that are in between and how it impacts your localization use cases.

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