Some new information about Babel that may be of interest to the topic of this thread.
I have received an email from Javier Bezos (whom I know from the Spanish-speaking TeX users' mailing list), who is the current babel mantainer, as well as the person responsible for all the improvements and new features of the package. Although he is not currently an Emacs/Org user, he has been following this thread with great interest, so I am transmitting here, with his permission, some interesting comments from him: #+begin_quote [...] I am very interested in all possible improvements in babel so that it integrates as best as possible with automatically generated files. Among them are the possibility of using BCP47 codes or using a language (at least basically) without the need for a prior declaration. These are things already done, but there are others that can still be improved. [...] any suggestion for improvement is very welcome [...] Among the things I agree on is name issue. I am unifying the dice in the CLDR as much as possible, and already, in fact, it is very advanced: https://latex3.github.io/babel/guides/locale-naming.html [...] The ini files contain information that is not actually used by babel, but that could be useful in other packages or even external applications. One of them is the name of the language in English and in the vernacular form, as they are in the Unicode CLDR. As I explain in the link I gave you, the purpose is that the babel name is based on the CLDR name with mechanical changes. Anyway, CLDR names are also included in the ini files, to establish correspondences more easily. #+end_quote
