Since the publication of the babel system in [1] several changes have occurred. With the new release of LATEX – which appeared at the end of 1991 – the internationalised version ILATEX, prepared by Joachim Schrod [2] was withdrawn. But some of its functionality was still needed, so a modification of the babel system was necessary.
Besides this a couple of bugs were reported and had to be fixed. The major problem was that the language changing commands were not `local', they contained global definitions. In the current version these commands obey grouping correctly.
Some macros that formerly were in language-specific files have been moved to the core of the system, because they are being used in several language-specific files.