What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would
like to read about Milwaukee?
Hopi speakers make up 0.002% of the population of the US. This isn't
very big, but it's not very small, either.
If you consider it at a state level, just over 0.1% of the population
of Arizona speaks Hopi.
Over 5800 people total speak Hopi (about 1000 of them living outside
of Arizona), including a number of monolinguals. In one generation,
this number is expected to increase rather than decrease, although
with the deaths of "baby boomers" while the number will go down, the
percentage is expected to go up.
Nearly all 5800 people speak Hopi "better" than they speak English,
and literacy in Hopi is high (especially when compared with, say,
Navajo). This is not to say that none of these people have advanced
English skills, just that for almost all of them speak English as
their second language.
This is a language that people still use regularly, it is a language
with radio broadcasts and publications in it, it is a language which
some people still use more than they use English and which for
thousands is a collection of the words which come before all else.
In the case of a language such as Winnebago (no, it's not the language
of people who live in trailers), which has been extinct for a while,
the prospect of an encyclopedia is much more questionable. That's not
the question I'm asking here. We aren't talking about a language which
is no longer used or spoken.
Also please keep in mind that "minority language" includes any
language not spoken by the majority - thus, Catalan is a minority
language in Spain although it has over 8 million speakers, Telugu is a
minority language in India although it has over 20 million speakers,
but in the same vein Hopi is a minority language in Arizona with just
under 6 thousand speakers, and Havasupai is a minority language in
Arizona with 580 speakers (550 in Arizona, or 0.012% of Arizonans),
although Havasupai is spoken by every single member of the Havasupai
nation.
Thus we are not talking about language preservation exactly, but
rather building an encyclopaedia in a minority language as an aid to
the continued existance of the language - Havasupai is used in
schools, as is Hopi, and with Wikipedias in these languages there
would be a vast body of written knowledge available to educators and
to learners alike, and people would have access to information in
their first language.
What some people seem to be thinking of is a Wikipedia in a language
with barely any or no remaining speakers as a sort of work of art.
This is also an important concept, but there are obviously many more
differing viewpoints here and the exact situation would differ from
language to language. However that isn't exactly what I'm talking
about.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:13:22 -0500, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage
is contained in the language
itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can
ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in
the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly
capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the
perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin
as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on
quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant
corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something
separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where
the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to
me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve
it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful
than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in
terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms
of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because
nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l