I'm following up on an issue I reported for the movie Prey about a year ago. Prey is a movie in which Comanche is spoken quite heavily, with it even having a full Comanche language dub. However, the only listed languages are English and French, as Comanche isn't included in ISO 639-1, which is the language standard this site uses. I was linked to a discussion which is now over ten years old, wherein an admin expressed that no new language options would be considered. If this is not the most up to date statement on this issue, I apologize, but it's what I was told by a moderator.

I really do think this topic is worth revisiting, especially as it's clearly come up multiple times in the decade since this was stated. Such a viewpoint is limiting at best, and at worst discriminatory towards many, many foreign language films. In particular, films with native or aboriginal dialects, as these were languages simply not considered worth including when the standard first came into being in 1967 (I understand it has been updated since, but not in the past 20 years). As filmmakers and the film industry continue to grow in previously underrepresented communities, these languages will only increase in use. It's not a good look when a film uses majority or entirely native languages in its dialogue and the only way this can be reflected on this website is by tagging the film with a language spoken by colonizers of that group/people. This is especially worth considering because other sites used TMDb for data, and perpetuate this misinformation. A move towards ISO 639-2 or ISO 639-3 needs to at least be discussed in order to remain equitable and relevant.

As a sidenote: Cantonese is not in ISO 639-1 standards (as far as I'm aware). However, this website has a separate tag for Mandarin (Chinese) and Cantonese. I'm not sure why this is, but it appears inconsistent with the stated intent of not updating language options.

Thank you for reading! I hope this will generate some discussion and I look forward to hearing the thoughts of website members and staff.

Edit: I realize this post could not be more relevant, as the new Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon cannot appropriately be tagged with the Osage language.