Thank you for this nice summary.
Being a linguist myself, I would like to add one thing:
This question cannot be decided on linguistic grounds alone. The
situation of what once was called "Serbocroatian" _always_ has a
political dimension, too. The ISO codes were added probably due to
political considerations, too. And if "having an ISO code" is the
criterion, we should stick with that and not fight over whether that
code is linguistically justified or not.
If there is an active community, I would not be in favor of closing or
marking as ineligible.
Best,
jan
Am 2023-04-28 19:32, schrieb Jon Harald Søby:
Montenegrin is probably the longest-standing
issue we have in the
language committee, and it has been requested numerous times through
the years. In the beginning of the language committee, the nation of
Montenegro itself was brand new, and Montenegrin had already been
"lumped in" with Serbian for a long time (well, at least since the
Serbo-Croatian code was split up).
For a number of years, and this may be why LangCom's stance on
Montenegrin has been the same, Montenegrin simply didn't meet one of
the formal criteria: having an ISO 639 code. Then, in 2017, the
language finally got its own code, but there was skepticism within the
committee because the code was an ISO 639-2 code and not an ISO 639-3
code. The registrar for ISO 639-2 is the US Library of Congress, while
the registrar for ISO 639-3 is SIL International. For all their
faults, the latter is at least perceived to be more linguistic-minded,
but many people saw the code coming to ISO 639-2 first as a sign that
this was a _politically_ motivated decision, and not a
_linguistically_ motivated one. A single language (and not a language
group/macrolanguage) having a code in ISO 639-2 and not in ISO 639-3
was a highly unusual situation.
However, it seems to me that the code was also added to ISO 639-3
later without much fanfare, though there isn't the usual paper trail
on the ISO website:
https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/cnr
I have dug up previous discussions from the mailing lists that I would
advice all language committee members to read through. Most of them
are on the internal list, because the discussions happened before we
reached consensus to have a public list. That means they are not
available to external list observers, but committee members should
have access. If you don't, reach out to me off-list, and I will help
guide you through the process.
1. April 2007: The thread "Incubator and conditional approvals [4]".
It is a very long thread, the parts most relevant for Montenegrin
happen in mails 2–8, but the rest can be an interesting read too if
you want more context.
2. March 2010: A single email "Request for Wikipedia in Montenegrin
[5]" from our now-former member, User:Millosh, who is himself Serbian
and therefore knows the local situation quite well.
3. December 2010: The thread "Montenegrin Wikipedia rejected [6]"; it
was rejected because a pending request to add an ISO 639-3 code for
Montenegrin was rejected (or not acted upon?) by the registering
authority.
4. May 2011: The thread "Montenegrin 4 [7]"; rejected because of
continued lack of ISO 639 code.
5. Also May 2011: The thread "orthographies and macro-languages [8]",
giving some details about the relationship of the various
Serbo-Croatian languages.
6. July 2011: Parts of the thread "Eligible status for Wikipedia in
Tunisian Arabic [9]", which went a bit off that topic.
7. March 2017: The thread "Rejection of Wikipedia Prekmurian [10]",
with more details.
8. December 2017: The thread "Montenegrin Wikipedia (URGENT) [11]",
which came after the ISO 639-2 code was approved, but before it was
added to ISO 639-3.
And then there's the current thread.
As we can see, I don't think there was ever a clear consensus to
outright reject Montenegrin. There was a consensus for many years to
wait until they potentially got an ISO 639 code, but when that finally
happened, it happened in what I would describe as an "out-of-process
way", which seemed perhaps "suspicious" on linguistic grounds.
ons. 26. apr. 2023 kl. 13:28 skrev Kimberli Mäkäräinen
<kimberli.makarainen(a)tuni.fi>fi>:
I think it would be a good idea to look more into
this, preferably
by asking linguists specializing in this language/these languages
for their opinion. Having an ISO code is not a guarantee one way or
another that they are separate languages and there are plenty of
languages bundled under a single ISO code.
mvh. K
-------------------------
From: Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2023 4:55 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
<langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Langcom] Re: Montenegrin - ineligible?
Thanks for bringing it up, Amir. I promised a user a while back [1]
to bring up the Montenegrin issue again, but I haven't done anything
about it yet.
The last proper discussion we had about Montenegrin in this list was
in this thread [2] from March 2018 (+ this reply [3] from Steven).
Since then the language committee's composition has changed a bit,
but I don't know if the situation wrt. Montenegrin recognition has
changed – back then, the ISO 639-2 code for Montenegrin was quite
new. But it could be good to hear some more opinions from within the
committee before it's marked as ineligible again.
tir. 25. apr. 2023 kl. 14:53 skrev MF-Warburg
<mfwarburg(a)googlemail.com>om>:
I agree.
Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> schrieb am Di., 25.
Apr. 2023, 14:26:
Hi,
There's this old, contentious discussion:
I somehow thought that it's already marked as ineligible, but it
isn't. I'd say that it should be marked as such. I've allowed
localization in that language on translatewiki, similarly to en-gb,
de-ch, etc., but it doesn't seem distinct enough for a whole
Wikipedia.
Does anyone disagree? If not, I'll be bold and mark it as ineligible
in a week.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע
אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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Jon Harald Søby
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