History:Release Language

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Status: This Page is Glorious History!

The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past. We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.

Releases have two linguistic attributes, language and script. The language attribute (e.g. French) records the language of the release title and track titles, (not the lyrics and not the extra information on the disc sleeve), and the script attribute (e.g. Latin) records the general type of characters in which the release and track titles are written. In most cases, the script will be guessed correctly, so you don't need to worry too much about it. The language guessing is less accurate, and may be hard even for an experienced person to determine.

For classical releases, please check out the ClassicalReleaseLanguage guide for some discussion on how to determine the language of classical releases.

Languages

MusicBrainz uses the ISO 639 language codes to record languages; there are over 400 different languages, and a list with several thousand being developed. However, few of these languages are used in many MusicBrainz releases, so by default, a reduced list of 20 languages is presented (you can request a complete list if the correct language for a release is not listed). The reduced list includes the official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish), the special case 'Multiple Languages', and the 13 other languages that are most frequently used in MusicBrainz data. The languages are chosen in this way for fairness, allowing the community to choose which languages are most important when they set the language of a release.

If several languages are used in the titles, choose the most common language. For releases where there's an equal mix of two or more languages and hence no obvious answer, 'Multiple Languages' may be the best choice. But remember that it is quite common for languages to borrow words and phrases, and so "Je ne sais quoi" in an English title does not make something multiple languages, nor do a few English words in a foreign language title. (Some languages borrow quite extensively, and especially for Japanese, unless most of the titles are in other languages, Japanese is probably the best choice.)

In some cases, the release and track titles written on a release may include translations or transliterations.