# Human-language coverage and official-status evidence — 0.2.0

## What this release covers

- 28 distinct language codes in the sourced official-language sets of the United Nations (6), European Union (24), and the six named official languages of the African Union, plus the AU protocol’s open-ended clause for any other African language. Overlap is deduplicated.
- One additional project locale, Persian (`fa-IR`), for 29 locale records total.
- Ten concept records and 290 lexicalization candidates across 29 locales. All 290 terms are explicitly marked `needs-review`; **zero** are claimed to have been human-reviewed or verified.
- A versioned JSON registry and JSON Schema that keep institutional/legal status separate from product translation readiness.

## Important limits

“Official language” is contextual: an institution, state, region, municipality, court, or public service may have a different legal regime. This release is not a global census of all national, state/provincial, indigenous, minority, or sign-language official statuses. The African Union’s constitutive text also includes “any other African language”, which is intentionally recorded as an open-ended clause rather than falsely treated as a closed list.

The language tags are locale identifiers, not proof of legal status. This release uses a Simplified Chinese UI profile (`zh-Hans`) for its draft; the UN’s official-language designation is “Chinese” and is not redefined by that UI choice. English is represented by the `en-US` lexical locale while the institutional language code is `en`.

## Sources checked 2026-10-28

- UN official languages: <https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages>
- EU official languages: <https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en>
- African Union Constitutive Act, Article 25 (as amended): <https://opendata.pap.au.int/akn/aa-au/act/2000/constitutive-act/eng%402003-07-11>
- BCP 47 / RFC 5646: <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5646/>
- ISO 639:2023: <https://www.iso.org/standard/74575.html>
- Unicode CLDR: <https://cldr.unicode.org/>

ISO 639 and BCP 47 help identify languages and locales; CLDR supplies localization data. None of those three is a global legal source for official-language status. Institutional source references are stored per record in `human-language-registry.json`.

## Publication gates still open

1. Recruit native-speaker reviewers per locale and record review provenance.
2. Add country and subnational official statuses from primary government/legal sources with effective dates.
3. Expand beyond the initial 10 concepts using a concept-first terminology workflow.
4. Add locale-specific accessibility, pluralization, date/number/currency, and right-to-left layout checks before claiming product UI localization.