Add method to return random languages (ISO-639 data)

[jeremyhofer]

Clear and concise description of the problem

I am currently working on a project where I would like to return a random ISO-639 code in mock data. It would be great for faker to support this internally similar to location.countryCode

Suggested solution

I'm not sure which module it may fit in well today, or if a new module may make the most sense, but my proposal would be to add a language or languageCode method within faker. The method would take as input a variant based on the ISO-639 standard, defaulting to ISO-639-1 (2 character) codes when called without parameters.

Link to the standard: https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

The variants I propose to be implemented are:

1. 639-1 - to return 639-1 2 character codes
2. 639-2 - to return 639-2 3 character codes

The additional sets - 639-3, 639-4, 639-5 - may also be implemented. Similarly, the English, French, and German language names as defined in the standard could be added as variants.

Alternative to the specific sets, an alpha-2 and alpha-3 variant approach could be taken where alpha-2 would be the 639-1 code set and alpha-3 may be the 639-2 set.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[github-actions]

Thank you for your feature proposal.

We marked it as "waiting for user interest" for now to gather some feedback from our community:

• If you would like to see this feature be implemented, please react to the description with an up-vote (:+1:).
• If you have a suggestion or want to point out some special cases that need to be considered, please leave a comment, so we are aware about them.

We would also like to hear about other community members' use cases for the feature to give us a better understanding of their potential implicit or explicit requirements.

We will start the implementation based on:

• the number of votes (:+1:) and comments
• the relevance for the ecosystem
• availability of alternatives and workarounds
• and the complexity of the requested feature

We do this because:

• There are plenty of languages/countries out there and we would like to ensure that every method can cover all or almost all of them.
• Every feature we add to faker has "costs" associated to it:
  • initial costs: design, implementation, reviews, documentation
  • running costs: awareness of the feature itself, more complex module structure, increased bundle size, more work during refactors

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View more issues which are waiting for user interest

[matthewmayer]

compare #1548 (requesting full language names)

[ST-DDT]

I would probably put it in the location module.

Also we should probably close #1548 (as superseded by this), as this has a better description.

[matthewmayer]

The codes like "en" are not locale dependent so they should be in fakerbase

The language names are locale dependent however. So it would probably be two methods?

faker.location.languageCode() and faker.location.language()

[ST-DDT]

I thought about using something like [{ name: English, alpha2: EN, alpha3: ENG }, { name: German, alpha2: DE, alpha3: DEU }].

As for the base I though about using the languages own name as the name there, but not sure about that.
[{ name: English, alpha2: EN, alpha3: ENG }, { name: Deutsch, alpha2: DE, alpha3: DEU }]

Reason being, that some language selection dropdowns show the name, but internally use the code in their data.

[matthewmayer]

I'd still make it two methods for consistency with .country() and .countryCode()

Anyway I agree with closing #1548 to keep discussion and upvotes in one place

[ST-DDT]

I added this to our meeting notes for discussion:

• faker.location.countryCode({variant: 'alpha-2'}) vs faker.location.countryCode().alpha2
• Make the human readable "name" a variant instead of a separate method.

[matthewmayer]

Note that only a small number of languages have a 2 character code. Many more have a three character code.

[ST-DDT]

Preliminary Team Decision

• We will wait for more user interest or at least after the major changes for v9.0 have been done.
• We will change the countryCode (and languageCode) methods to return complex objects.
• The languageCode method has a parameter to filter for the presence iso2 codes
• The actual implementation will be decided/discussed along with the pull request