[Foundation-l] What to do with moribund languages?

[Andre Engels]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:53 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I realized that at Requests for new languages [1] we have a number of
> proposals for projects in moribund languages [2]. In brief, when
> roughly less than 1000 dominantly older persons speak one language,
> this language will be dead when those speakers die. Even some larger
> languages [than mentioned ones], like Lower Sorbian [3] is (with
> ~15.000 of speakers) are deeply endangered and it is almost
> predictable that this language won't be alive in the next century.
> But, cases like Lower Sorbian one is -- are border cases -- and I
> don't see a problem with creating such project inside of the standard
> procedure.
>
> However, we have some number of cases where project is requested for a
> language with less than 100 older speakers.
>
> My proposal is to do the next in the cases of moribund languages:
> * Reject proposal for project creation.
> * Suggesting them to put their language corpus at [multilingual] Wikisource.
> * Allowing them to work on Incubator if they really want to spend some
> efforts on language revival.
> * If a project at Incubator shows possibilities to be a live one, they
> may ask for project again, when they will have to pass all necessary
> steps (localization of MediaWiki and so on).
>
> This is a kind of a "political issue", so I prefer to see discussion
> here before discussion at Language subcommittee.
>
> [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death
> [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Sorbian

As far as I know, _all_ new languages are supposed to show their
possibility at the incubator nowadays, which to me means that there is
no need for a separate policy on these languages. My proposal would
be:
* Give a warning to the proposer that the language edition is likely to fail
* Maybe be a bit stricter before allowing the language out of the
incubator (larger languages might get away with a bit lower
requirements because there is some 'expected future activity' to
compensate)

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com