On 5/3/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Now I would like to pose my question in a casuist way:
Could requests for
wikipedias in Zeelandic and Town Frisian be granted. Neither is generally
considered a seperate language (those some linguists do call them
languages), but Zeelandic is a clearly bordered regional language which
differs about as much from Dutch proper as Nynorsk from Swedish (as far as I
can judge) and is, when spoken, very problematic to be understood for Dutch
speakers, while Town Frisian is a mixed language with a 16th century
Hollandic vocabulary and Frisian grammar and phonetical principles.
Moreover, it goes without saying that these variants (to avoid both the term
"language" and "dialect") are not allowed on nl:, being a
standardised
language.
I don't necessarily support requests for wikipedias in those (thogh I would
be willing to contribute), but I would like to know where the community
draws the borders.
I don't think there's any clear definitions yet, but the points that I
think would be worth considering are:
* The amount of difference to an existing language
* Whether it is generally, somewhere or hardly anywhere considered a
language rather than a dialect
* Whether there exists a well-defined and generally accepted orthography
* Whether there are Wikipedians willing to write for the Wikipedia and how many.
In general, we have gone with ISO-639 in deciding what is a language
and what a dialect, only Allemanish and Aromanian have been accepted
without such a code. However, that too is not an official policy, just
a "the way we have done it till now".
Andre Engels