id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	resolution	keywords	cc	parents
1070	Handling languages Babel currently doesn't (Na'vi, Lojban)	Christopher Allan Webber		"Currently, Babel doesn't support languages like Na'vi, Lojban.  The unfortunate side effect of this is that when our language tooling hits these languages, it explodes.

Looking into how to fix this, it looks like Babel [https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/blob/master/scripts/download_import_cldr.py#L16 downloads] the [http://cldr.unicode.org/ CLDR data] on languages, and this is used to populate a big ol' dictionary which is stored in [https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/blob/master/babel/localedata.py#L22 babel.localedata:_cache].  Unfortunately, while we *can* monkeypatch this variable (simply [https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/blob/master/babel/localedata.py#L51 load('en_US')] once then append 'jbo' or etc to the dictionary), the value we would have to supply is a very, very complex data structure, and I doubt we could provide it correctly.  This value is extracted by Babel during the [https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/blob/master/scripts/download_import_cldr.py CLDR data downloading/importing process] and it is a non-trivial exercise.

I [https://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel/issues/30#issuecomment-66796699 filed a bug looking for a workaround for unidentified languages], but I think a workaround will be hard given the large amount Babel relies on this data.  So, probably, we will need to supply CLDR data, but that data is too complex to just write by hand.

One way or another (monkeypatching or not), in order to supply these, we need the proper CLDR data.  I spoke to someone involved in the process, and found two things:

* They are welcome to contributions of Na'vi and Lojban to their catalog, and there is a [http://cldr.unicode.org/development/new-cldr-developers new contributor page]. We should (and likely will) do this.  Probably, the process for getting things officially will take some time.
* In the meanwhile, while going through the process to generate those, we should be able to get the appropriate files to run through the necessary tooling to generate the data we need.
"	defect	accepted	major		infrastructure			tsyesika Boris Bobrov