IMO we should have tried harder to make Unicode language tags useful and used. But it didn't happen, so they're a thing of the past. Of course, they're still there, and one could attempt to resurrect them, but most likely one would fail.
> RFC 2482, "Language Tagging in Unicode Plain
> Text" [RFC2482], describes a mechanism
> for using special Unicode language tag
> characters to identify languages when needed.
> It is an idea whose time never quite came.
> It has been superseded by whole-transaction
> language identification such as the MIME
> Content-language header [RFC3282] and more
> general markup mechanisms such as those
> provided by XML. The Unicode Consortium
> has deprecated the language tag character
> facility and strongly recommends against
> its use. RFC 2482 has been moved to
> Historic status to reduce the possibility
> that Internet implementers would consider
> that tagging system an appropriate mechanism
> for identifying languages.
>
> A discussion of the status of the language tag
> characters and their applicability appears
> in Section 16.9 of The Unicode Standard
> [Unicode52].
IMO we should have tried harder to make Unicode language tags useful and used. But it didn't happen, so they're a thing of the past. Of course, they're still there, and one could attempt to resurrect them, but most likely one would fail.
Choice quotes below:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6082
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch16.pdf (section 9 of that chapter, 16) (Reformatting is mine.)