Most of the time I prefer to avoid those hot-tempered arguments but this time I'd like to share a few things that crossed my mind while reading the e-mails on the Dutch Low Saxon issue. I hope I can keep it reasonably short.

1. Of course, Wikipedias should try to unite as many people as possible and transcend minor variations in languages (e. g. British and American English share one Wikipedia).

2. Of course, the regional variants of Low Saxon form a dialect continuum, i. e. mutual intelligibility decreases with increasing distance.

3. Of course, in linguistics national borders don't equal language barriers.

4. However, in real-life political borders in Europe have throughout the centuries left clear marks on the way people speak and write. New words and idioms entered the dialects almost always via Standard German or Standard Dutch respectively. Whenever speakers of Low Saxon dialects write something down, they fall back on the languages they were taught writing in - that is either Dutch or German. Furthermore, all Low Saxon speakers in the Netherlands are confronted with Standard Dutch every single day while those living east of the border deal with Hochdeutsch day after day. Thus, speech varieties can and do develop separately if they're spoken 4 km apart from one another - even if that's only the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot in Arizona.

5. Of course, splitting nds into Dutch and German editions will not eliminate the difficulties a person from Pommeria will face in trying to understand the vernacular speech of someone from East Frisia. But it will reduce the overall spectrum the Low Saxon Wikipedia has to cover now.

When I first read the request for a Dutch Low Saxon Wikipedia I considered it a little far-fetched myself. But it's a matter of fact that we can't expect people from the Netherlands to adapt to the "German" lexicon and way of spelling used in nds if they want to contribute. Accordingly, any "Dutch" orthography and loan words like "pagina" or "kreeren" would simply appear strange and "foreign" to anyone living in Germany.

So I've come to the conclusion that while it might appear an inappropriate solution from a scholarly (or ivory tower?) perspective to set up a separate Wikipedia for Low Saxon in the Netherlands, it is a very workable solution from a real world perspective.

I really do not think that this is the solution. I'm sure there is a better one, than dividing people up by nation -- this is not what Wikipedia does, we have subdomains for languages, not countries. nds-nl would be a subdomain for a country, rather than a distinct language.

Loanwords such as "pagina" can be converted with conversion software, along with orthography. Also, if it's so true that these languages are difficult to understand each other, what's the deal with Lowlands-l and people talking to each other in LS all the time, both from Germany and the Netherlands?

I think that a great deal of it is that if you want to be able to understand a speech variety similar to your own, you'll understand it a great deal more than if you don't want to understand it.

Some people would look at the Scots sentence "Scots is a Germanic leid that's spak in the Scots lallans an in Northern Irland, whaur it's kent as 'Ullans' in offeical circles, bit by ordinar fowks as 'Scotch' or 'Scots'." and say "That's absolutely incomprehensible.", because they don't really want to understand it. But it's very clear to me, without having studied Scots, what it means. "leid" is not a word I learnt growing up, but its meaning is very clear from context ("Scots is a ... leid", "leid that's spak"). The same is true of "kent". I never learned this word in school or at home. But it's quite clear from context that it means "called".

In spoken language, I would most likely not really be able to understand that, but in written language I can read it with not much trouble at all. Certainly, nearly all the words are spelt differently than I would spell their English counterparts, but it's obvious which words they're cognate to. I certainly wouldn't say it's "difficult" for me to read either.

Mark