On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:02:10 +0100, Andreas Brändle andreas@obacht.ch wrote:
As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia, since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there isn't a language code?
I want to make you aware of the consequences of setting up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia:
*Every single dialect group in Switzerland will have an own WP. There are around 100 local dialects (Baseldytsch is one of the bigger ones). *There are also regional and local dialects in Germany and Austria who might want to have their own WP
Am 18.11.2004 um 12:55 schrieb David Rossel:
Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects. That would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon mixture of native dialects.
In this point I agree with you.
But basically you want to set up a Wikipedia for one city with some 160'000 inhabitants and 600'000 inhabitants in the surroundings (where they already speak a slightly different dialect). That is comparable with an American suburb; let's call it Springfield. Imagine they want to have an own Wikipedia, because they're feeling so different, although they're all reading and writing in english.
A Baseldytsch Wikipedia would have much sense as a repository for words that only exist in Baseldytsch and not in German. But for that purpose it might be better to find a way to implement dialect and regional language culture into to the big German one.
German is a standardized language that everyone between the Matterhorn (southern part of Switzerland) and Hamburg (northern Germany) understands, reads and writes. In fact Swiss (also the people in Basel) read better German than their local dialect, because they're not used to the written form of the dialect. That makes German the best language for sharing knowledge within this geographic area. And sharing knowledge is actually the purpose of Wikipedia.
I am not against wiki-encyclopedias in Swiss German dialects. I am very proud of my native dialect and I wanna preserve it as well. But in my opinion this doesn't support the much more important purpose of Wikikpedia to make free knowledge accessible to everyone. If everyone sets up its own wiki, wiki-culture doesn't work anymore.
Cheers Andreas
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Ainu, an isolated indigenous language of Japan with perhaps around 200 native-fluent speakers, has no ISO code, even though it is definitely not a dialect of any other language by anybody's measurement. The O'odham language has almost 50000 speakers, and is by no measure a dialect of another language, but has no ISO code. (allow me to correct myself, these have collective ISO codes but not individual codes) Having no ISO code does not mean a language is not a language, or that it is negligible.
As far as bsd not being an ISO code... it would of course take more time, but one option would be for our proposers here to take it to the committee which oversees the standard and request that their language be added to the standard.
That aside, I think the best domain would probably be http://baseldytsch.wikipedia.org/
Speaking of which, now that a speaker of Friulian has actually turned up on the ML and is already a Wikipedian and has been for some time, and there are no linguistic issues with Friulian, can somebody create http://fur.wikipedia.org/ ? The language name is "Furlan".
If you actually care, there are already websites in Friulian, for example http://www.friul.net/ http://www.lenghe.net/ http://www.partitrepublichefurlane.org/ http://www.siencis-par-furlan.net/ http://www.glesiefurlane.it/ http://www.sacilotto.net/index_fur.htm http://www.scritorsfurlans.org/ http://www.lacomugne.it/ http://www.istitutladinfurlan.it/ http://www.ladinsdalfriul.org/ http://www.lingue.regione.fvg.it/minor/fu/homepage.aspx etc etc etc...
Mark