Language standardization in Steem

I'd like to post in Finnish and start to build the community to Steem. But currently it's not easy. What kind of tag I should use to indicate the language? fi, fin, finnish, suomi? Whatever I choose, I have to actively teach it to other Finnish users – especially new users! – so that they can find it and know what to use when posting in Finnish.

If there is a standard way of indicating the language, the whole community building will be much easier process for everybody.

To solve this problem, I created an issue to GitHub where I propose using a special language tag to get the job done properly.

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Steem needs a standard way of telling what language the post is written in. If there is no standard, it's really hard for UI to filter posts and show only the languages that user understands. For a good user experience, it's not preferable to show languages that the user doesn't understand.

If there is no standard, UIs will have to use other means to detect the language and filter the posts. I don't see it as a great solution.

My suggestion is that Steem should implement a language tag feature. It is the most easiest way as far as I can see. Tag system already exists, so the only thing that is needed for standardization is to decide what kind of tag is a language tag.

Best standard to specify a language is ISO 639-3. It includes all written languages and has a three letter code for each of them. It's perfect for our needs.

Language tag could be, for example, expressed in a format like this: #iso639-3-xxx, where xxx is the language code. Another possibility might be to replace hash with some other special character (like %xxx). Or use double hash to do it (##xxx).

Currently the amount of tags that a post can have is limited. This limitation should not be applied to language tags. A user should have possibility to insert at least two language tags per post. We have already seen lots of bilingual posts in Steem. Also everybody who wants to teach a language needs to write with at least two languages. But we don't know what kind of use cases there will be in the future, so I suggest that we limit language tags to five per post in the beginning. If a legitimate use case appears that will need more tags, we can always add them later.

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I'd like to see this implemented in the blockchain as soon as possible. In the long run Steemit.com should be able to filter languages so that a user will see only the languages that he understands. It's not a priority yet because other languages besides English are so rare. First thing is to decide what the standard is so that people can start to use it as soon as possible.

When Steemit.com implements language filtering, maybe the best way would be to have a dropdown menu or something similar so that users don't need to find out themselves what is a correct tag for their language. But easiest way of implementing this as soon as possible is to use the current tag field.