7000 is very, very, very wrong..
If I recall corectly, some islands has over 5000 on their own??
Even so, I will not support a unified North Frisian Wikipedia.
And please do not go around asking for new Wikipedias without at least
nominal support from a native speaker.
Mark
On 09/05/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Wouter,
I have a major issue with this request.
That is: Do you have /any/ native speakers who have expressed interest?
No, not yet, but I am confident it will succeed, for unlike with
Saterlandic, there seems to be a well developed infrastructure of devoted
users, some of which will certainly be willing to contribute. There is at
least one known example of a non-quotation North Frisian on Wikipedia,
probably left by a (near-)native speaker.
Also, I am a firm believer in North Frisian
dialectal solidarity. I do
not think there can or should be a single North Frisian Wikipedia. We
should start with one for Mainland North Frisian, then we can have
another for Söl`ring, one for Ferring, Oomram, etc.
Now, I will lift a quote from an e-mail in response to me on
"lowlands-l" regarding North Frisian:
//begin quote//
You and I and other language "geeks" (and I mean this in the best possible
way of course) would not find the North Frisian varieties all that
different
from each other. We would think they are fairly easily mutually
intelligible. However, apparently the average person that not think so,
and
this seems to be mainly because some of the shifts, especially vowel
shifts,
are rather dramatic. Some people talk about "Frisian *languages*."
You're right: the differences are big. On the other hand, people have to
cope with similar problems on li:, nds: and als:, covering a very broad
spectrum of quite dissimilar but somehow coherent dialects. If North Frisian
were still spoken by nearly all of the population, two or more North Frisian
Wikipedias would be a possibility, albeit that it would be problematic to
convince the wikipedia gurus of its necessity, but since the language has
only some 7,000 speakers (estimates vary), we can't afford spiltting it up.
I was planning to use two variants of North Frisian, Fering-Öömrang and
Bökingharder dialect, on the most important pages, f.i. the Main Page and of
course redirects can solve a lot of the problem. Finally, while the mainland
and insular dialects may be mutually unintelligible for many when spoken,
written text allows much more mutual understanding. And don't forget that
all native speakers learnt Frisian, Low Saxon and High German all in their
childhood, so they are more focused on language variants then most of us
are.
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