Dear Amir and LangCom,

Thank you for raising this important question.

As someone from Bangladesh and a native Bengali speaker, I don’t think a separate Wikipedia in Noakhalian is necessary or practical right now. Even though ISO has recently approved a code for it, in reality, Noakhalian is widely understood to be a regional dialect of Bengali. It’s mostly spoken, and there’s no standardized way to write it. People may use it informally in speech or on social media, but when it comes to reading, writing, and formal communication, everyone uses standard Bengali.

There’s also no real literary tradition or educational use of Noakhalian as a written language. Practically speaking, all speakers already use Bengali Wikipedia comfortably. Creating a separate project might lead to unnecessary fragmentation and confusion, especially when the existing Bengali Wikipedia can cover Noakhalian topics just fine.

For these reasons, I personally feel that this request is not strong enough at this stage to support a separate Wikipedia project.

Best regards, Abrarul Hasan

On Fri, Jul 4, 2025 at 4:11 AM Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

Hi,

There's a new request for a Wikipedia in Noakhali (or Noakhalian):

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Noakhal...

The ISO 639 code oak was approved just a few months ago: https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/oak

The code is so new, that Ethnologue still doesn't have a page for it; if I search for "Noakhali" in the search box, it finds it as a dialect of Bengali.

So I can think of two potential issues:

1. If ISO 639 approved a code, it may mean that the language is distinct

from Bengali. Or not. ISO 639 already approved some codes for languages that weren't distinct. I guess that this is not the case here, because the politics here are not the same as in the Balkans, for example, and also because Glottolog lists this language in a branch that is quite far from standard Bengali: https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/noak1234

2. The language doesn't seem to have a standardized written form.

Formally, it's not necessarily a problem, but it may be an impediment in practice.

I'm somewhat inclined to mark it as eligible, but I'd really love to hear more opinions.

Thanks!

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ _______________________________________________ Langcom mailing list -- langcom@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to langcom-leave@lists.wikimedia.org