Why is the culture name for English (Caribbean) "en-029"?

Question

Why is the culture name for English (Caribbean) "en-029"?

I know "en-CA" is used for English (Canada), but why 029? What does it signify? Why was it chosen?

Alcyone

Answer 1

Michael Kaplan (aka Microsoft's Unicode guru) just wrote a blog post about that last week.

EDIT

And actually, if you read the comments you'll see that 029 isn't even an ISO 3166 code because ISO 3166 is only about countries. That's where UN M.49 comes in which defines codes that specify:

a wide variety of geographical, political, or economic regions, like a continent, a country, or a specific “group of developing countries”.

And that's where you get code 029 for Caribbean.

Cordwood

What are the odds? (Maybe he wrote the post after seeing this question, but changed the date? ;-)) Thanks for the info! – Alcyone

I couldn't believe it either! In another week I might have forgotten about it. – Cordwood

Answer 2

It might have something to do with country area codes assigned by United Nations.
I might be wrong but I believe there is more than one country in the Caribbean area, therefore MS decided to assign the territory code rather than specific symbol (the latter probably is not registered).

Brucine