Thank you, Oliver!
I am resetting counter (now + 7 days is deadline) with the proposal to
approve one Dinka Wikipedia, with the "macrolanguage" code "din".
On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 3:36 PM, Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen(a)sil.org> wrote:
I received replies from five Dinka language scholars
(one of them a native
speaker), representing DILDA (the Dinka Language Development Association),
SIL International and the University of Edinburgh. They all unanimously
declared that one wikipedia for ISO code [din] will be sufficient. They also
were supportive of Prof. Myhill's efforts on behalf of the Dinka wikipedia
and for a unified orthography.
Individual reasons given included:
"To the best of my knowledge, the dialects are mutually intelligible."
"I would find it really pretty tragic if Wikipedia forced the Dinkas to
pursue multiple written standards. With only a few million speakers in an
unsettled political context, Dinka is going to have a hard enough time
making a success of creating a written standard as it is; chop it up into
four or five "languages" and you more or less guarantee that they are too
small to have any impact. Obviously there will be lexical and grammatical
differences in the work of different writers, but that's true of different
varieties of English, too, without implying that we're dealing with a
collection of separate languages."
"The designation of four Dinka languages reflect dialect cluster identities
and church denominational areas where attitudes favour separate Bible
translations, but are not highly developed identities in other ways
(political/military). The designation of one Dinka macrolanguage reflects
not only high overall lexical similarity (80%+) and mutual intelligibility
(90%+) as assessed in the SIL survey (Roettger & Roettger 1989), but also a
larger ethnolinguistic identity expressed through one common agreed
orthography, and more recently through one language development
association."
"Dinka people look to Thuɔŋjäŋ [ethnonym for Dinka language] as one language
but not languages. Those Dinka varieties can be realized as dialects in a
spoken language."
So, I guess, that clinches it, and we can go ahead with
din.wikipedia.org
(on the condition of successfully concluding verification, of course!).
Best,
Oliver
On 02-Feb-17 13:24, Oliver Stegen wrote:
I know a couple of linguists working on Dinka. Bible translations are
definitely existing or going on in different varieties but maybe, one
wikipedia may still work. I'll keep you posted once I've heard from my
contacts.
On 29-Jan-17 06:50, Milos Rancic wrote:
Oliver, I think this is your area... According to Ethnologue, Dinka
[1] is a Nilo-Saharan "macrolanguage", with languages Northeastern
Dinka [2], Northwestern Dinka [3], South Central Dinka [4],
Southeastern Dinka [5] and Southwestern Dinka [6].
The whole population is 1.4 million, it's about very poor South Sudan.
Is there a sense to create one Wikipedia or to go with separate
languages?
[1]
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/din
[2]
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dip
[3]
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/diw
[4]
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dib
[5]
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/dks
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