Field level fallback value is lost when new version of a dictionary item is added

Question

I'm having an issue keeping the value of the fallback language field after creating a version of the current language.

To recreate the issue:

1. Open a Dictionary Item that has a language fallback (es)
2. Select a new language (es-ar), noticed that Key[Shared] and Phrase[Unversioned] fields have the corresponding Spanish fallback values.
3. Click "Add a new version"
4. When the new version is added, the Phrase field lost its Spanish value. Is this an OOB behavior? If not, what may have been causing this behavior?

Answer 1

It seems to be the correct behavior, language fallback is only applicable when you don't have any version for that language.

In Sitecore's doc wording

you specify the fallback language that determines which language version of an item or field that you want displayed when there is no version available in the current language.

If you want the item version "es-ar" to use the same values as "es", simply don't create a version for "es-ar". (Assuming that you have set "es" as the fallback language for "es-ar")

If you want newly created items to have certain default values, use the Sitecore standard values to define it.