On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen(a)sil.org> wrote:
As a linguist I cannot support the argument that
"it is only a dialect", as
the continuum between language and dialect is often arbitrary and political.
However, based on the argument that Sichuanese Mandarin does not have an ISO
code, I support the rejection of this request. Should they succeed in
getting an ISO code for their language (for which there seems to be good
reason if I understood the linguistic arguments correctly), then the request
can be reopened or renewed.
While I agree with rejection in this case, I would add here one
(generic) set of arguments why following ISO 639-3 strictly is not
appropriate for Wikimedia (and the other one in relation to
Prekmurian).
Wikipedia is not just about a language, but about a *written*
language. For example, written phonetically, English varieties could
be even more different than Eastern Scandinavian languages (including
Norwegian Bokmal) or East Slavic languages. However, they've been
written in a couple of very similar orthographies and there is no
reason to create the set of Wikimedia projects in Texan English.
In the Chinese case, it goes even further: As long as the syntax is
more or less the same and the same characters are used to designate
the same concepts, creating a project in a Chinese variety (not just
Mandarin) would be redundant. In other words, any request for
Wikimedia projects in Chinese written in Han should convince us that
their variety is distinctive enough to have a separate project, no
matter of having an ISO 639-3 code.