Language notes

Per-language behavior that goes beyond the support matrix in the README.

Relative expressions

Every extract_datetime implementation resolves relative phrases against anchorDate: "tomorrow morning", "next tuesday", "in 2 hours", "day before yesterday", and their equivalents. Purely relative offsets ("in 2 hours") keep the anchor's time of day. Day-level expressions ("tomorrow") resolve to midnight unless a time is present or default_time is passed.

Time formats understood

Digit forms (15:30, 3:30 pm) parse in every language alongside the spoken forms. Portuguese also understands the 15h30 / 14h30min style. Explicit years parse in the languages with full date support ("11 de agosto de 1998").

nice_time conventions

• Languages with a 12-hour speech habit (en, pt, es, and others) speak "half past one" style with an optional am/pm marker (use_ampm=True produces "in the morning" equivalents).
• use_24hour=True produces military-style readings ("thirteen thirty").
• French reads 12-hour by default ("une heure vingt-deux", "huit heures moins vingt").
• Basque, Catalan, and Persian have their own idiomatic readings. Catalan supports TimeVariantCA for bell-tower style.
• Occitan (classical orthography, Lengadocian variety) reads 12-hour with the traditional quarter idioms: "una ora e quart", "cinc oras e mièja", and the quarter-to form naming the next hour ("doas oras manca un quart" for 1:45). Noon and midnight are "miègjorn" and "mièjanuèch".

Asturian (ast)

Full support: nice_time, nice_date, nice_date_time, nice_day, nice_weekday, nice_month, nice_year, extract_datetime, and extract_duration. Spoken time follows the feminine-article convention ("la una", "les cinco y media", "les ocho menos cuartu", "en puntu") with use_ampm=True adding "de la madrugada / mañana / tarde / nueche". Duration parsing handles the Asturian plurals in -es (hores, selmanes, díes) as well as the singular forms. "mañana" is ambiguous between "tomorrow" and "morning" and resolves the same way as in Spanish.

Kabyle

Weekdays are the everyday Arabic-derived names (letnayen through lḥedd). Months follow the Kabyle calendar spellings (yennayer, fuṛar, through dujembeṛ). extract_datetime covers the relative day words (azekka "tomorrow", iḍelli "yesterday", ass-a "today"), weekday and month names with day numbers, digit clock times, and spoken clock phrases (see below). It does not yet cover year words. extract_duration accepts both the Amazigh neologisms (tasint second, amalas week) and the Arabic-derived units in daily use (ddqiqa minute, ssaɛa hour), with an optional genitive n between quantity and unit (10 n tesdidin). nice_time joins hour and minutes with the conjunction d. Day parts use ssbeḥ (morning) and tameddit (evening). Years are given in digits. A verified spoken-year formulation is not available.

Spoken clock phrases

extract_datetime understands the native "presentative" clock grammar built around d ("it is"), not just digit times.

• Bare hours: d lweḥda (1:00), d lɛecṛa (10:00).
• Exact: swaswa marks the hour precisely (d lɛecṛa swaswa).
• Quarter/half: u ṛbeɛ (+15), u neṣṣ/azgen/nofc/nofç/nefs (+30). All four spellings of "half" are accepted, spanning the Amazigh word, the old Arabic borrowing, and two contemporary variants.
• Minus: ɣiṛ plus a number subtracts from the next hour (d lɛecṛa ɣiṛ xemsa = 9:55). ɣiṛ ṛbeɛ is quarter-to. Bare ɣiṛ with no number is a vague "almost the hour" and resolves to a fixed 10-minute-to offset, matching the source grammar's own description of it as indeterminate rather than a specific count.
• Vague plus: u wac / u ci ("and a bit") resolve the same way, as a fixed 10 minutes past.
• Day-period disambiguation: a trailing n <period> both attaches a period and resolves 12h/24h ambiguity. d juǧ alone stays 2:00, but d juǧ n uzal resolves to 14:00. Periods recognized: ṣṣbeḥ (early morning, 4-8h), ssbeḥ (morning, 8-12h), uzal (midday, 12-15h), tameddit/tmeddit (afternoon/evening, 15-20h), iḍ/yiḍ (night, 20-4h).
• Regional variant: ssaɛtin is accepted as an alternative to juǧ for "two o'clock" (Soummam valley usage), for example d ssaɛtin ɣiṛ xemsa (1:55).
• Midnight set phrases: nṣaf n yiḍ and ttnaṣfa n yiḍ both resolve directly to 00:00.

Clock-hour nouns carry a fused definite article that the parser strips before handing the word to the number extractor. This surfaces two ways, mirroring Arabic sun/moon letters: a plain l- before some consonants (lɛecṛa, lxemsa) and gemination of the noun's own first consonant before others (ttnac = article + tnac "12", ttlata = article + tlata "3"). "One o'clock" also uses the feminine loan-numeral weḥda, agreeing with the feminine noun ssaɛa (hour), rather than the masculine waḥed used elsewhere.

Not yet handled: the preposition af ("at") as an alternative to d (Af ttlata n ṣṣbeḥ, "at three in the early morning"). Only one example of this construction is attested, and it is unclear whether it behaves identically to d in every pattern above. nice_time also does not yet generate these forms (fractions, day-periods beyond ssbeḥ/tameddit, the vague markers). Extraction is currently richer than generation for this language.

Norwegian Bokmål (nb)

Bokmål is supported with no accepted as an alias. It covers nice_time, nice_date, nice_date_time, nice_day, nice_weekday, nice_month, nice_year, nice_duration, nice_relative_time, extract_datetime, and extract_duration. Number and ordinal words use the modern tens-first counting reform (tjueen = 21) with decimal tens (femti, åtti), so years read "nitten hundre og åttifire" and "to tusen og tjueen". Weekdays are mandag through søndag. One o'clock reads with the neuter ett (klokka ett). extract_datetime covers relative day words, weekdays with neste/forrige, month names with day and optional year, and digit clock times.

Fallbacks

If a language has no extract_datetime implementation, the dateparser library is tried. It handles absolute dates well but not conversational relative phrases.

nice_duration uses a generic per-language unit table (nice_duration_generic) for languages without a dedicated implementation. Plural declension may be imperfect (for example, Slovenian dual forms).

Romanian

• nice_time speaks quarter-hours idiomatically: "opt și un sfert" (8:15), "opt și jumătate" (8:30, half past), "nouă fără un sfert" (8:45, "fără" means minus, quarter to nine). Exact hours take "fix". use_ampm=True appends "dimineața" / "după-amiaza" / "seara" / "noaptea".
• "luni" is both Monday and the plural of "lună" (month). A numeric context ("3 luni") selects the month unit, otherwise it is the weekday.
• "mai" is both May and a very common adverb. It only parses as a month next to a day or year number ("3 mai", "mai 2019").
• Spoken numbers are understood in dates, times, and durations ("peste trei zile", "douăzeci de minute").

Danish (da)

• nice_year supports an explicit AD/CE marker via nice_year(dt, "da", ad=True), appending "e.Kr." the same way bc=True appends "f.Kr.". The two are mutually exclusive. If both are passed, bc wins. Years are implicitly AD when neither flag is set, as before.
• The ad parameter is part of the generic year_format engine and is a no-op for any locale that does not define an "ad" key in its year_format resource, so it does not affect other languages.

Known gaps

• Relative past wording ("anoche", "bart", "last night") is not handled in es/eu. The corresponding tests are skipped.
• nice_time is missing for sl.
• gl and hu extract_datetime are partial (see the README matrix).
• The resolution / replace_token options of extract_duration are only available on the shared duration engine. ar, ast, fa, kab, and sv use a dedicated parser that returns a plain timedelta and rejects those options.

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