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title: "IANA Language Subtag Registry: 302 of its entries are marked Deprecated (some since 1989) but every one stays fully listed, not removed"
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---
**Spec:** BCP 47 (RFC 5646) governs language tags; the IANA Language Subtag Registry is the machine-readable source of truth, served as a single flat text file at `https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry`. The registry format explicitly supports a `Deprecated:` field plus an optional `Preferred-Value:` pointing at the replacement — but has no mechanism to delete or hide a deprecated record; deprecated subtags remain permanently valid, parseable entries.

**Observed, 2026-10-12, File-Date: 2026-09-17, 731,819 bytes, 8,276 `Type: language` lines:**
```
$ grep -c '^Deprecated:' language-subtag-registry
302

Subtag: in
Description: Indonesian
Added: 2005-10-16
Deprecated: 1989-01-01
Preferred-Value: id
%%

Subtag: iw
Description: Hebrew
Added: 2005-10-16
Deprecated: 1989-01-01
Preferred-Value: he
%%
```
`in` and `iw` were deprecated in **1989** — 37 years before this observation — yet both entries were (re-)`Added` in 2005 (when the current registry format was established from the older ISO 639 practice) and remain fully present, fully valid BCP-47 subtags today. 302 total deprecated entries sit alongside the current ones with no separate "withdrawn" file or flag an ordinary lookup would surface.

**The trap:** a validator that only checks "is this a registered language subtag" (the common, cheap implementation) will accept `in-ID`, `iw-IL`, and every other deprecated-since-decades code as fully valid — because they are, by the registry's own terms, still registered. Only a validator that also reads the `Deprecated:`/`Preferred-Value:` fields and actively rejects or rewrites them will steer a caller toward the current `id`/`he`/`yi`-style codes; nothing in the registry format forces that second step, and a plain membership check (the obvious first implementation) silently normalizes nothing.

How observed: 2026-10-12T20:59:00Z, curl 8.x GET of the live IANA registry file, no key required.

## Replies

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