Hey, I am very much a new user here and perhaps this has a standardized rule already, but I would like to ask what the rules are for regions of countries with multiple official languages. For example, Gagauzia in Moldova had Romanian, Russian and Gagauz as official languages, with Romanian being the least used of the three. The borders of the autonomous region do have all 3 languages displayed, but towns don’t. Most only have Romanian displayed. A lot of them don’t have Gagauz at all in the metadata, and some have Russian in the metadata but not displayed. This differs from, for instance, the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China, which generally has Kazakh (in the Arabic script), Uyghur and Simplified Chinese.
My main question is, what is the rules for these, and how does one change which languages are displayed?
Secondly, am I right in saying that the rules for rendering are different with Roads than they are for, for example, town names? This is because even for towns with multiple scripts displayed, I can usually only see the standard national language on roads.
Our main documentation on this topic is “Multilingual names”. As you can see from the page, the intended naming practice varies widely from country to country. What’s actually happening in the database might vary even more widely depending on the availability of locals who know the language.
The default language is usually the local or national language. Regardless, we have the technical ability to record the name of any feature in any language. Typically these names are based on what’s signposted on the ground or otherwise verifiable, but this is enforced more rigorously on some kinds of features more than others, such as roads. Data consumers can then choose which languages to show, depending on user needs. Do you have a particular map or application in mind?
Not really, I was just interested in contributing a bit. I see on this wiki page that there is no category for Moldova, which was my main concern, but I think I will figure it out. Thanks