From: "Andre Engels" engelsAG@t-online.de

As strange as it may sound, it is not fully nonsense. As I understand, our own contributor and Steward Arno Lagrange grew up in a family where Esperanto was the language spoken at home, and thus can be considered a native speaker of the language.

No, you misunderstand my intention. I've actually met a family from Rochester NY who are raising their children with Esperanto as the lang in the home. And I was delighted to speak with the little boy in Esperanto. That wasn't my intention. The fact that the Ethnologue mentions that Esperanto is a language native to France and has 200-2000 native speakers there is highly irregular. In fact it is a lie. Esperanto was Zamenhof's invention and he wasn't French, perhaps they meant "Ido". Gasp!

But really, if the info here is flawed and they have no respect for the truth in this matter how can you trust what else they claim. I've been a World Language teacher for 18 years (and a professional translator). In my evaluation these errors make the Ethnologue list highly flawed and very suspect.

If a language has documents published in a certain language, and has a following of active users. And the ISO recognizes this and assigns an abbrev. this in my opinion is a much better standard than some biased and prejudiced linguist list. Not that the Ethnologue list doesn't have it's merits, and it is usable for some research purposes, but definitely not for the purpose of basing a decision on whether a language merits inclusion in the wikipedia project or not.

I maintain that the ISO list is a much better standard in this respect. And the Wikipedia may actually help some minor languages be included in the ISO list in the future... consider this. A minor language of Latin America, spoken by some few folks in the jungle and having no written standard form is assigned some other subdomain name. (e.g. Guarani-dialect-B.wikipedia.org, not that there's anithing such, I think.) If they get a hundred articles written in a common acceptable or unagreed standard it could be brought to the attention of the ISO, they get a shorter address after they are assigned an abbrev. and the Ethnologue gets a hold of their existence (and would probably mention that there are actually 100-1000 native speakers in France, as well, by the way, maybe the emigrated ;-)

But we have gl.wikipedia.org and there are still arguments pro or con a standard written form for Gallician/Galego. There's a lot of other languages out there who are minority languages which may be recognized by the ISO but which don't actually yet have the necessary standardization that would bring a common look to the articles in a Wikipedia project based on multiple persons editing a specific article. One could use one spelling another yet some other prefered spelling etc.

In this regard several conlangs, constructed languages, are actually more settled, Occidental/Interlingue comes to mind, there is a small group of speakers who are active and use it in publications even today. It has an ISO code "ie" and it has almost a century long history of use and a library of publications, an extensive and detailed vocabulary in the sciences and yet it doesn't have a wikipedia namespace.

But let's move the discussion to Wikipedia-l and consider what needs to happen for some acceptable stipulations to be accepted which will result in the inclusion or exclusion of a certain language. This would be very helpful although it does seem quite difficult.

With regards, Jay B.