[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

[Delirium]

Sheng Jiong wrote:

>Singlish, like Cantonese, are widely used in informal dialogues and
>writings. But it not "natural" for Singaporeans or Hong Kongers to
>write formal essays using Singlish or Cantonese, and neither are they
>accustomed to read any formal written works (such as an encyclopedia)
>that are published in languages that they think should only occur in
>daily conversations.
>  
>
While this is true, several other languages and language dialects for 
which it's also true are very recently being used in formal settings.  
For example, the Scottish Parliament has a version of its webpage 
translated into Scots [1], which is to a first approximation a phonetic 
way of writing English spoken with a Scottish accent, plus some modified 
grammar and vocabulary.  Similarly, Northern Ireland distributes 
election materials written in Ulster Scots [2].  If anything, Singlish 
is less mutually intelligible with "standard English" than either Scots 
or Ulster Scots are.  The main difference seems to be that, while the 
Scottish government wishes to promote the use of Scots as a legitimate 
language, the Singaporean government takes the opposite view of Singlish.

Other, more creole-like examples are the Haitian mentioned earlier, and 
even modern Greek, which until the 1970s was considered an informal 
language not worth writing down, and all formal communication was 
written in an official standard Greek that few people actually spoke in 
daily life.

I guess this brings up the question of how we distinguish between 
these.  Should we care what the relevant governments think?

-Mark

[1] http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm
[2] http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/languages/ulsterscots.cfm