It should not be rejected outright without at least consulting with actual experts. I know a tiny bit of Standard and Levantine Arabic, but I'm definitely not an expert.
As far as I can tell, it's as eligible as Moroccan and Egyptian Arabic, which we've already approved. And this is true even though Levantive is often mentioned as one of the closest variants to standard Arabic.
There isn't a lot of published written content published in any of the Arabic variants other than Modern Standard Arabic, including Levantine. For the particular case of Levantine, I am aware of a complete translation of The Little Prince. There was a recent political campaign in Israel, with some written material in the local dialect, which is one variety of Levantine. There were also attempts to publish newspapers and books in it in Lebanon, but I know less about that.
It's also widely used in writing on social media. It's informal, but it is a thing nevertheless; if a language is popular on the web in general, it can contribute to its success in a Wikipedia.
So no, it probably shouldn't be rejected outright.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
בתאריך יום א׳, 1 באוג׳ 2021 ב-15:39 מאת Sotiale Wiki < sotiale.wm@gmail.com>:
- related:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Levanti...
It was proposed in 2015 and has been abandoned for about 2 years, but has received intermittent attention over the past few years. ISO 639-3 code is assigned to this language, and there is a test project in Wikimedia incubator, but there are 5 pages except templates, categories, talkpages, and modules.
Looking at the discussion, it seems that speakers of this language can speak Arabic for granted. Arabic speakers seem to perceive this as a dialect of some sort.
I wonder what you think of this proposal. I think it is appropriate to be rejected unless evidence is presented that this is not at the level of a dialect that does not differ to an incomprehensible degree from Arabic.
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