What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
Hopi speakers make up 0.002% of the population of the US. This isn't very big, but it's not very small, either.
If you consider it at a state level, just over 0.1% of the population of Arizona speaks Hopi.
Over 5800 people total speak Hopi (about 1000 of them living outside of Arizona), including a number of monolinguals. In one generation, this number is expected to increase rather than decrease, although with the deaths of "baby boomers" while the number will go down, the percentage is expected to go up.
Nearly all 5800 people speak Hopi "better" than they speak English, and literacy in Hopi is high (especially when compared with, say, Navajo). This is not to say that none of these people have advanced English skills, just that for almost all of them speak English as their second language.
This is a language that people still use regularly, it is a language with radio broadcasts and publications in it, it is a language which some people still use more than they use English and which for thousands is a collection of the words which come before all else.
In the case of a language such as Winnebago (no, it's not the language of people who live in trailers), which has been extinct for a while, the prospect of an encyclopedia is much more questionable. That's not the question I'm asking here. We aren't talking about a language which is no longer used or spoken.
Also please keep in mind that "minority language" includes any language not spoken by the majority - thus, Catalan is a minority language in Spain although it has over 8 million speakers, Telugu is a minority language in India although it has over 20 million speakers, but in the same vein Hopi is a minority language in Arizona with just under 6 thousand speakers, and Havasupai is a minority language in Arizona with 580 speakers (550 in Arizona, or 0.012% of Arizonans), although Havasupai is spoken by every single member of the Havasupai nation.
Thus we are not talking about language preservation exactly, but rather building an encyclopaedia in a minority language as an aid to the continued existance of the language - Havasupai is used in schools, as is Hopi, and with Wikipedias in these languages there would be a vast body of written knowledge available to educators and to learners alike, and people would have access to information in their first language.
What some people seem to be thinking of is a Wikipedia in a language with barely any or no remaining speakers as a sort of work of art. This is also an important concept, but there are obviously many more differing viewpoints here and the exact situation would differ from language to language. However that isn't exactly what I'm talking about.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:13:22 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is contained in the language itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark
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