Rendering non-default language in OSM-Carto standard map

Introduction

OpenStreetMap’s standard map rendered in OSMCarto style use only the name tag, for good reasons but what happens when you want to create raster maps in a language of your choice? How do we use the name:xx tags?

Problem

India’s map is in English but it officially recognizes 22 languages for its culturally and lingually diverse states including English, Tamil, Malayalam etc.

How do I render OSM Standard map in my mother tongue - Tamil?

Apparently it is just an if statement of three lines in the right place.

Solution

The only hack AFAIK is to change the name tag before data is dumped into postgresql, to do that we need to sideload a lua script to osm2pgsql during the dump using the --tag-transform-script parameters, documentation for it is available here.

… Переглянути весь допис