LANGUAGE markup was important and an orthogonal issue to
charset marks.
So you could write: (wrong syntax but you get the idea)
<LANGUAGE FRENCH> Sacré bleu!</LANGUAGE>
is a french exclamation.
The character set is the same, but the languages are different.
Similarly, charset markup is important. This was not
completely resolved as far as I remember.
<LANGUAGE FRENCH CHARSET="ISO-8859-1">Sacré</LANGUAGE>
<LANGUAGE GREEK CHARSET="ISO-xxxx-y">Zevs</LANGUAGE>
where Zevs would be the bytes rendered in the appropriate
greek character set. Knowing the semantic nugget: this is in Greek
is a bonus, but not required for character sets to be marked.
Christian "feel free to correct this vague recollection"