On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 7:40 PM, Steven White Koala19890@hotmail.com wrote:
Kichwa Wikipedia (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Kichwa): Interesting request. There is already a "Quechua" Wikipedia at qu.wikipedia.org. That's a macrolanguage code for all Quechua varieties, but that project itself is apparently written mainly in the Southern Quechua varieties spoken in southern Peru and Bolivia. The test project under discussion here uses qug, the language code for "Chimborazo Highland Quechua", but in fact represents a variety of Ecuadorean (Northern) varieties. (The Wp info pages on Incubator for 13 other codes redirect to this one.) According to the English Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechuan_languages#Classification) mutual intelligibility between regions is not complete. I am not in a position to say whether the current quwiki can or should incorporate this content in the long run, but on the whole I'm inclined to recommend that this be marked "eligible" for now.
Quechua is, actually, a primary language group (although likely connected with Aymaran), but the distance between the languages is not on the level of, for example, Indo-European langauges.
What's more important is that there is an ongoing process of standardization of the northern Quechuan languages into one standard Ecuadorian Quechua language. As far as I remember, the Kichwa request is, actually, the request for that language and it is likely that the new Ecuadorian Quechua would get another ISO 639-3 code, as it will be based on multiple existing languages.
I agree to make ti eligible, not to insist on "pure Kichwa" in Incubator and to be ready to change the code in the future.