pango:script-sample-language (script)

script -- a pango:script value

The pango:language instance that is representative of the script, or nil if no such language exists.

Given a script, finds a language tag that is reasonably representative of that script. This will usually be the most widely spoken or used language written in that script: for instance, the sample language for the :cyrillic value is ru (Russian), the sample language for the :arabic value is ar.

For some scripts, no sample language will be returned because there is no language that is sufficiently representative. The best example of this is the :han value, where various different variants of written Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all use significantly different sets of Han characters and forms of shared characters. No sample language can be provided for many historical scripts as well.

This function checks the environment variables PANGO_LANGUAGE and LANGUAGE, checked in that order, first. If one of them is set, it is parsed as a list of language tags separated by colons or other separators. This function will return the first language in the parsed list that Pango believes may use script for writing. This last predicate is tested using the pango:language-includes-script function. This can be used to control Pango's font selection for non-primary languages. For example, a PANGO_LANGUAGE enviroment variable set to "en:fa" makes Pango choose fonts suitable for Persian (fa) instead of Arabic (ar) when a segment of Arabic text is found in an otherwise non-Arabic text. The same trick can be used to choose a default language for PANGO_SCRIPT_HAN when setting context language is not feasible.