And there's also the Marwari request:
It had some activity in the past, but isn't active recently (there were a few minor technical edits in Decemeber 2024, but it's not really article-writing activity).
It is marked as "eligible", and here begins the issue. Rajasthani and Marwari are *probably* kind of the same thing. Here's why I think like that it may be like that:
1. The English Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajasthani_languages says "The term Rajasthani is also used to refer to a literary language mostly based on Marwari." It refers to the book "The Indo-Aryan Languages" by Colin Masica. I found the book online, and it indeed says that.
2. At the discussion on translatewiki, where the Rajasthani language is requested (
https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Support#Request_to_enable_Rajasthani_(raj) ), there are several links to sites that demonstrate the language's usage.¹ I cannot read them, but for fun, I tried pasting them to Google Translate and to Claude.ai. Google Translate identified it as "Marwari" (with the code "mwr" appearing in the URL), and Claude.ai identifed it as "Rajasthani". (I should also mention that Google Translate doesn't specifically support "Rajasthani".) Of course, I don't trust either of those blindly, but it *may* be a sign that the languages are the same, or at least very similar.
Another issue is how language codes for Rajasthani and Marwari are defined in ISO 639 3:
* mwr ("Marwari") is a separate macro language:
https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/mwr . One of its individual languages is called "Marwari (India)", and its code is rwr. Google Translate uses "mwr", and the "Marwari" requests on Meta uses "rwr".
For what it's worth, according to both Glottolog and Ethnologue, Marwari is part of the Rajasthani branch.
All of the above is just very basic information I could find. I don't know the languages. It's very hard for me to make a good decision here, and I need the committee's help. Ideally, if a Wikipedia is created, and the software is localized, it should be done in a language that is already at least somewhat standardized, and can be read by some people. The language code usage should follow practices on other websites, but the only website I saw that uses any of these codes is Google Translate, which uses mwr.
If we mark raj as eligible, and rwr is essentially the same language, then perhaps we should revoke the eligibility of rwr.
But these are just thoughts. I would really appreciate more thoughts from other members of the committee. Thank you!
¹ I have to comment that this is a very good thing in general. I wish that all the people who request new languages did that.
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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore