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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The notion that a language is moribund is problematic. Choosing a level of
100 speakers is arbitrary, because who says so. The requirements are that
someone who speaks the language natively is part of the starting project is
already tough. When people have created an incubator project, the language
committee does check if the language is indeed what it is said to be. In the
end, small languages do not cost us much anyway. New projects start nowadays
with at least some 200/300 articles and consequently new projects are bigger
then the bottom 40 Wikipedias

What I find more problematic are the people who suggest new project because
they just think it a good idea. They waste our time. New languages are
welcome, but we really need a community to support any language project.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2009/1/4 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

> 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
>
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