"Erik Moeller" erik_moeller@gmx.de schrieb:
Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at all for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO 639-2, more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if there's a written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the interest of wikipeace ..).
Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents have been written within the last 50 years or so.
Andre Engels