Hi Wouter, I don't think there can be much practical opposition to your request because in practical terms, East Frisian / Saterlandic Frisian and West Frisian / Westerlauwers Frisian are different languages. I think you should create a mainpage at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/test-wp/Friisk and you could also perhaps create some sample content pages. Mark On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 23:35:39 -0500, Stephen Forrest <stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Hi Pavol, I agree with you mostly, but we must admit: even in your example sentences, Czech and Slovak share many many cognates: the only words which aren't obviously related or even identical are "taktéž i" vs "aj". If you substitute Czech "ů" for Slovak "ô", Czech "ř" for Slovak "r", Czech "t" for Slovak "t", and Czech "i" for Slovak "í", the ONLY differences in those two sentences is as I noted "taktéž i" vs "aj", and "se k nám" vs "sa k nám". Polish, on the other hand, is obviously more different. This does not mean they cannot be independent lnguages, I just want to point out that your example isn't much effective to prove the point. I think that you could take an article from the Czech Wikipedia, go through and change some minor things, and have a perfectly valid Slovak article. It amazes me to no end that these sorts of close Wikipedias do not engage in wider content-sharing programs: Indonesian and Malaysian Wikipedias are in a similar situation. However, even the Czechoslovakian government considered them as two different languages. The case of the FYRs' (former yugoslav republics) languages, with the exception of Macedonian and Albanian, is perhaps more compelling, as until relatively recently there were no such languages as Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin. In fact, Serbian nationalists such as Nikola Smolenski try to assert that Montenegrin is not a separate language from Serbian, and even that Bosnian is just "Serbian as spoken in Bosnia". Why not calling Serbian, "Montenegrin as spoken in Serbia"? Although these sorts of nationalist politics have no place in Wikipedia articles, they already appear on [[Montenegrin language]] and [[Moldovan language]], both of which are not exactly NPOV and play down the possibility of them being separate languages (neither page notes that there is no definitive, universally agreed-upon boundary between language and dialect, but rather paints a picture of nationalist freaks trying to get what is "obviously" a dialect considered a separate language). If you think they are not NPOV, you should see the article on Montenegrin language at the Serbian wikipedia, and the article on Moldovan language at the Romanian Wikipedia (thankfully, the Moldovan Wikipedia has a much more neutral version, noting that it is the official language of Moldova, but that not everybody recognises it as separate from Romanian). Generally, languages are considered separate by experts if they meet one of three criteria: 1. They have less than 80% lexical similarity in spoken form, 2. A significant portion of the speaker population of one variety considers them separate, or 3. They are official languages of different nations, with different official names or the script usage varies. The first one catches languages whose speakers do not nessecarily consider them separate (although experts might), such as various Quechua varieties. The second one catches languages that are borderline (ie, 81% lexical similarity) but that the population considers separate, or cases where (in the words of the ethnologue) "separate literature [is] nessecary". The third catches languages that may be widely considered to be the same, but who use different writing systems (Dungan vs Sichuan Mandarin, Greenlandic vs Inuktitut, etc) and languages whose governments declare them separate with no significant speaker support (no current examples, although it is concievable that in a violent separation between two linguistically similar portions of a single country, they would declare their languages separate without support from the people) Mark On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 08:08:02 +0100, Pavol Cupka <pavol.cupka(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l