Which script oral language will use anyway? - Wikimedia-l

22 Aug 2019

Dear Wikimedians,

Some of you might be recovering from the Wikimania fatigue. Those of you
who have already recovered, I wanted to pick your brain about something
that came up multiple times during discussions but none really seem to have
a clear answer.

Which script (writing system) an oral language speaker would use for
creating an entry on (gateway [1]) projects like Wiktionary or Wikibooks or
even uploading a list of words on Commons using a tool like Lingua Libre?
Will it be the script used for the official language of the region where
the former language is from?[2] This is a bit controversial as native
speakers of many indigenous languages would see this as a form of
colonization. Will it be the w:International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)? This
is probably the least controversial but a common and average user might not
be able to read IPA as the latter was created by linguists and was created
for linguistic and scholarly studies rather than for everyday use.

Wikimedians who are native speakers of languages with less written/recorded
documentation and individuals who work on such languages are more
encouraged to share their inputs based on past experience.

1. Gateway project: This is a made-up term to define the Wikimedia projects
that are more welcoming to newbies and do not require stringent citation as
almost all oral languages would lack that. It was fascinating to see Amir
challenging that it only takes about 30 seconds to add an entry to
Wiktionary (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amir_Aharoni_demonstrating_how_to_a…
)

Subhashish