Comment 13 for bug 991002

Hi bubulle,
Thanks for your well researched opinion. As the original reporter of this bug, I just want to offer some small observations on your post.

Firstly, "La langue de la République est le français. " is from the french version of the constitution. We do not necessarily requested use of the name "বাংলা" in native language. We just want the English name that is used by the republic.

Secondly, the wikipedia reference you mentioned is wrong. That is not your fault, but if you look at the original text of the constitution which is referred at the end of the wikipedia page at http://www.parliament.gov.bd/Constitution_English/index.htm , you'll see that the text contains "Bangla", not "Bengali". And this is from the official English translation of the constitution, not the Bangla version.

Just for a little more reference, there is an effort to use Bangla as one of the official languages of the United Nations, you can see at the news reports that English language newspapers refer to the language as Bangla: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-02-19/south-asia/31076849_1_sheikh-hasina-bangladesh-parliament-official-languages . From the English speech of the prime minister hosted at UN site, you can see that there is no mention of Bengali, but Bangla is used instead: http://www.un.org/en/ga/64/generaldebate/pdf/BD_en.pdf

Even BBC calls its Bangla language service "BBC Bangla"- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Bangla ,and there are also a lot of examples where native speakers of English are starting to use "Bangla" instead of "Bengali".

Windows 8 also uses the name "Bangla", not "Bengali". Please see this screenshot:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/100483406/Bangla_Win_8.JPG

All these supports my original statement that the official name of the language in English remains Bangla. This also goes on to show that a lot of high profile organizations are starting to adopt the official name instead of the colonial one.

About Ethnolouge, the problem is that they are using the old name, and that probably contributed to that name being used in ISO standards, of which they are the maintainer. Actually even in ethnologue if you dig a little deeper and see the pages for some of the languages closely related with Bangla, you'll see mentions of language names like Sylhetti Bangla : http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=syl or Bahe Bangla, Anchalit Bangla: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=rkt but no mention of Bahe Bengali etc. So the derivative languages are already using Bangla, not Bengali.

Again my sincere thanks to you and also to gunnarhj for taking a look at this bug report. I really hope you'll start using "Bangla" in ubuntu instead of "Bengali"