"Tim Starling" ts4294967296@hotmail.com schrieb:
The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International, does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490 "languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of languages.
SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.
My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.
I have taken a look at the SIL list, and I find it to be honest rather astonishing. Looking at the languages in the Netherlands, I see that within the official Dutch language area there's 2 languages according to SIL (Dutch and Flemish including Zealandic), which sounds reasonable. But then the part in the east of the Netherlands where Low Saxon dialects are spoken, suddenly is considered 10 languages, whereas the many times larger Low Saxon area in Germany is only 2. It seems that there is measured with different measures there.
They even in some cases find 3 different languages where as far as I can see more standard treatments (like the map on [[nl:Nederlands]] consider them variations of the same _dialect_.
Even without those objections, the best thing to do seems not to be to drop 639-2, but look at SIL and 639-2 for different purposes. 639-2 is more applicable when the question is whether the language is large enough to beincluded. SIL is more applicable when the question is whether a language is enough separate to allow such. Still, I very much have the impression that the criteria are not consistent in their application.
Andre Engels