[Wikimedia-l] New proposal for a wiki Project!

[Kevin Behrens]

Language is identity! Would you like to tell those People that it is not bad when they lose their language. As I mentioned, I am a member of a linguistic minority, too, and I would feel like my human rights where taken if someone tells me I should learn another language because mine is not so much worth. Language is culture and is human right, everybody has the right for his language. 

What is your mother tongue? If it is English it is easy for you to tell the world to give up their languages in favor of English.
And besides, supporting minor languages mostly always supports bi- or trilinguism because you speak the majority and minorty language(s). Multilinguism is very beneficial for children. They can learn much easier new languages when they have two mother tongues. And in a world where multilinguism is getting more important this might be a real useful side effect. 

And what do you mean by “have so little information stored in them”? Just because they are not as far developped as the main languages doesn’t mean they carry zero information. In America there are Indian languages that have more names for the flowers in their environment and whether they are toxic or not than the biologist can’t give latin names for them. As language minorities mostly live in rural areas they are perfectly adapted to their environment and in their linguistic world/lexicon there are more concepts and ideas than people from the cities have. It’s big culture goods we can’t risk to lose. 


Von: geni
Gesendet: ‎18‎. ‎Februar‎ ‎2013 ‎22‎:‎58
An: Wikimedia Mailing List
Betreff: Re: [Wikimedia-l] New proposal for a wiki Project!



On 18 February 2013 16:33, Kevin Behrens <kevin_behrens at hotmail.de> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have started a proposal for a new wiki project: WikiLang (meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiLang). It is about endangered languages and >language documentation/decipherment. It is a very important step in order to save our linguistic diversity which is ongoing faster than >the extinction of animals.

Why? Most of the languages in question have so little information
stored in them that even if we assume a total loss of that information
(which is unlikely) that downside will be massively outweighed by the
upside of easier communication between people.

-- 
geni

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