I don't know, if a native speaker is requesting this, and especially if there are others who support it (note his use of "we", however often this is just used to refer to all speakers of the language), I don't see why we should ignore such a request.
Other Wikipedias have had to wrestle with the problem of standardisation, and some are still wrestling with it. For example, there is no Sicilian standard written language, so rules for this standard written language, including how verbs should be conjugated which varies from dialect to dialect, what pronouns are used which varies from dialect to dialect, and what articles are used which varies, and other similar things have been set forth in the "linguasiciliana" online community. For example, even the "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia" was a hot topic for a while. "Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libbira" was finally decided on (the original was "Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libira").
Other Wikipedias where there is a written standard, but it is weak or not widely known, are promoting it as well, for example the Luxemburgish Wikipedia has pages in the Wikipedia namespace explaining how to correctly write the language.
And what you say is not entirely true, when you speak of written Western Arabic early in your e-mail, I believe you're referring to Modern Standard Arabic as written from Libya westward, whereas later when you refer to it, as in bible translations, you appear to be talking about a transcription of colloquial speech.
The situation of dialects vs. languages is very complex and very debatable, especially in this case. Currently, Wikipedia favours neither and says "Algerian Arabic" rather than "Algerian dialect" or "Algerian language".
The problem here is that, while Algerian Arabic could easily be called a separate language from the Arabics of the Persian Gulf (yes, I meant "Arabics" with an s on the end), the differences between the Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, and perhaps Libyan (not sure about Libyan) Arabics are very small, so a Moroccan Arabic phrasebook should work everywhere west of Libya (at least, everywhere that speaks Arabic with the possible exceptions of Western Sahara and Mauritania, but that's a more difficult issue), so that it would probably be better to have a Western Arabic Wikipedia (this can probably be compared to Alsatian vs Alemannic, except that Western Arabics are not as different from one another as Alemannic dialects/languages are).
Indeed, there are many Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan merchants and beggars who have only the most basic knowledge of writing (they may know the alphabet, but not MSA) and thus they would only be able to read something written in the vernacular.
If this request is, for whatever reason, denied, there are a couple of cases where there is no question a separate Wikipedia is required: Cypriot Mennonite Arabic (the most divergent of all Arabics, also has a lot of Greek influence), various Arabic creoles and creoloids of sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps some Judeo-Arabics if they are still alive by the time it is requested (they are often very similar to other Arabics, but they use Hebrew letters and thus there is no mutual comprehensibility in the written form), and various Central Asian Arabics, although they appear to be headed downhill as well.
In addition, it should be noted that Maltese has a separate Wikipedia, and it can be considered an Arabic although its speakers will insist otherwise.
Mark
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 17:30:08 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 2:16 PM, medifel@altern.org wrote:
Algerian language, badly named "Arabic", Algerian Spoken, is the language of more than 20 millions persons. It's a mix of lot of languages like arabic, turkish, french, spanish, berber etc.
Western Colloquial Arabic is also spoken in Tunisia and Libya, and is basically part of the Arabic family of languages in its root and pattern grammar. The situation there and in many other nations is of "diglossia", where there is an official standard version of a language, in this case "Modern Standard Arabic", with colloquial use of a related language or dialect. The Romans during the empire had a similar situation, the written Latin being different from the spoken language. West Colloquial Arabic, sometimes called "spoken Arabic" has almost 30,000,000 speakers between all of its dialects.
That being said, the differences between the dialects - between countries and between rural and urban variations - are quite large. The Algerian varieties of the language show the beginnings of creolization with French, including imports of grammar, phrasing and words that are integrated at every level of the language. These include code switching
- that is, whole words or phrases lifted from French - down to the use
of words which have been made more arabic in sound and morphology, that is "loan words", though I've always disliked that term because they aren't given back.
It's not exactly arabic, because gramatically it's totaly different. Speakers of Algerian who don't know what we call "classical" arabic, don't understood arabic.
That's not entirely true. when written Western Colloquial Arabic is closer to written arabic than it is when spoken. As is the case in many societies where literacy rates are low, the spoken forms diverge a great deal more than the written forms do.
Algerian language is the common language of every body in Algeria, but since independance (1962), the Pan-arabism vision denied totaly the existance of a specific algerian language, as it denied the existance berber languages.
Closer to 85%, with numerous smaller languages, including the Berber familiies, taking up the rest.
Algerian language was almost not written at all (no newspaper, no book) but with the Internet we discovered that we coul wrote our own language (using latin alphabet with some specific caracters for special sounds). So we want to create an algerian Wikipedia to to persuade people that we can use our language as a normal one.
There is writing in Western Colloquial Arabic using Arabic characters. There are also missionaries who use colloquial Arabic for their conversion work, and there is if I recall correctly, a translation of the Christian bible into the dialect. Most of the extent source material is in Arabic characters.
Here is where information starts to run out, and judgment enters in. While there is no standardized form of this language, there is a recent ethnological dictionary, and there are manuals for spoken courses. There is little to no publication in the language. The wikipedia would be, almost literally, the first standardized such project, and is, almost by definition, an attempt to construct a nationalistic language. We were talking about nynorsk and bokmal earlier, this would, in effect, be the same kind of project that created nynorsk as a stable linguistic set in the first place: taking a series of dialects which are separate from the "High" version of the language and giving them a standardize literature which acts as the synchronization point for the language. Western Colloquial Arabic is a "normal" language - it is based on dialects that have been spoken in North Africa for hundreds of years, and has millions of speakers that are majorities in three nations.
However, the polities of each of these three nations are committed to a policy of diglossia, that is having a standard Arabic to be connected with all of the other major Arabic states. The writer referes to the "pan-arabist" version, which would correspond to the mandating of Modern Standard Arabic - a modernized version of classical Arabic - as the official language of government. This isn't to say "no", just to put forward that there is no government support for creation of WCA as a literate language.
While people may know that I am an advocate of such projects - the creation or recreation of languages through the Romantic language process - I am not sure that wikimedia is in that line of work. The state of WCA is "normal" for a non-literate language group, that is an inter-related set of dialects which are mutually intelligible to various degrees with some written examples, but no communication zone which works within the language. An analogy would be Middle English around 1300: there are several dialects, no one of which is predominant, some literature, but little in the way of standardization. My instinct would be to ask for proof that the Language formation process has occured, or is occuring: that is that there is a community which is conscious of their dialect as an aspect of group identity and is willing to engage in the work to create a body of literature, scholarship and standardization that goes with having a literate language rather than a spoken dialect group. Examples of this would be a widely read author who uses the "vernacular", publication of newspapers or books in the language, the creation of associations for preservation and advancement of the language, broadcasting in the language by native speakers, web sites dedicated to content creation and so on. Basically, signs that people for reasons of their own, are using the spoken vernacular in a written form which is converging on a written dialect that is distinguishable from MSA.
I don't know if people are looking for advice but here is mine:
- This sounds an awful lot like node, or someone similar. First rule
out trollship. I'm suspicious because the key feature of Spoken Algerian Arabic isn't spanish, it is French. And any speaker of WCA sufficiently with it to write to us would be reasonably fluent in French, which is both part of WCA and a widely used language in Algeria.
- There isn't, to my knowledge, a groundswell for creating WCA as a
written language. The person asking couldn't even like to one website which is devoted to making WCA a written language and unifying the dialects. This is a minimum: until there is activity, there is no "language" in the literate sense, there are dialects with written examples. Have the person proposing show support from some of these groups. This both indicates community, and it indicates good faith in the proposal: after all, a person genuinely wanting to advance such a cause would be happy to bring in as many groups as possible, where as a troll looking for a free play space to vandalize would not want others looking over his/her shoulder.
- If (2) can be documented, create a wiktionary for it. If the
wiktionary takes off, then that is good evidence for a language community that wants to have a written version of their spoken language, and is committed to creating it. If it is just one person documenting the language, that can be tested against published sources. If it is trollery, that can be seen fairly quickly.
- If the wiktionary works, create a wikipedia.
My two cents, YMMV.
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