Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Northwest African Arabic

Northwest African Arabic Wikipedia

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Requests for new languages (Wikipedia Northwest African Arabic)

submitted verification final decision Discuss the creation of this language project on this page. Votes will be ignored when judging the proposal. Please provide arguments or reasons and be prepared to defend them (see the Language proposal policy). (See an unofficial analysis of this request.)

Proposal summary
Language details: Maghrebi Arabic, also known as Darija or Derija (ara-nwa, combination between ISO 639-3 macrolanguage code for Arabic and proposed BCP 47 subtag for Northwest African Arabic) Editing community: {{{community}}} List your user name if you're interested in editing the wiki. Add "N" next to your name if you are a native speaker of this language. Relevant pages: development wiki project (doesn't exist yet; remove this when it starts to exist) External links: (add links here)
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This request has been proposed after discussion between Language committee and WMF Board members in response to the requests for Wikipedia Algero-moroccan arabic, Wikipedia Algerian, Wikipedia Tunisian and Wikipedia Moroccan. Note that just the first one (Algero-Moroccan Arabic) has been rejected, Tunisian is on hold, while Algerian and Moroccan has got eligible status. --Millosh 23:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

The request should be used to determine are there enough native speakers support to create one set of projects for Northwest African Arabic varieties. --Millosh 23:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Native speakers comments would be counted, mostly. --Millosh 18:21, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Arguments in favor

1. Favor. --75.119.226.202 02:25, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

IPs vote in Wikimedia ? --Helmoony 17:31, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

1. Favor. This type of Arabic is very different from Arabic spoken in the middle east. It is similar to the difference between Scots and English. Snood1205 23:00, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

1. Favor. This is not a dialect, this is a separate language.

I'd say it's closer to Dutch and English instead of Scots and English. Many people who speak this language don't know enough standard Arabic or French in order to use Wikipedia.

Just because it's catagorised as Arabic, doesn't mean it's a dialect. Arabic is not one language, it is tens of separate languages each having dialects. Selim_P 24:17, 19 December 202 (UTC)

Arguments against

1. No - Do we seriously need to create wikis in Dialects? We don't write wikis in slang... --Speedy Gonzalez 03:56, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

   This is, of course, an invalid argument against. If you consider colloquial varieties of Arabic to be slang, then yes, we do write Wikis in colloquial varieties of Arabic. We already have one in Masri (Egyptian Arabic). The purpose of this request is not to decide whether or not we should have Wikipedias in regional or local varieties of Arabic (if there is enough speakers willing to contribute, of course), but rather to decide how to divide it: should we have one for Darija/Maghrebi and one for Amiyya/Mashreeki, or should we have one for each country (Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Hejazi, Najdi, etc)? This particular request is about Darija (=Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.) --Node ue 20:20, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

2. oppose --U.Steele 20:03, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
3. Oppose - The Arabic Wikipedia is in need of more effort, breaking it up into smaller projects will just make it harder to make a complete Arabic resource.--Aa2-2004 14:20, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

   This is, of course, an invalid argument against. We already have one in Masri (Egyptian Arabic). The purpose of this request is not to decide whether or not we should have Wikipedias in regional or local varieties of Arabic (if there is enough speakers willing to contribute, of course), but rather to decide how to divide it: should we have one for Darija/Maghrebi and one for Amiyya/Mashreeki, or should we have one for each country (Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Hejazi, Najdi, etc)? This particular request is about Darija (=Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.) --Node ue 20:20, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

4. oppose. No community ready for it. No resources written in that 'language'. In what language will the wiki be written ? Are you going to invent a new language ? What alphabet ? What rules ? Wikimedia is not a place to invent new rules and new languages. Give me 5 websites or books written in that 'language' ! Or you kbnow what give me just one website. --Helmoony 17:34, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
5. Oppose Our Bigger country is divided into 22 puppet states. Does this mean we need to have a separate Wikipedia for each? Absolutely NOT. Besides these emotional reasons, I doubt the existence of such "a Northwest African" dialect, let alone language, as the Arabic dialect in Libya is different from the one in Algeria or Morocco, so which one will be adopted? Furthermore, I doubt the presence of substantial support for such a wiki. There is no intellectual production in these spoken dialects? I would not even know how to write in this dialect, although I am a native Arabic speaker and fully understand the dialect. Having said this, this project will find no contributions and will fail if ever started. We don't need additional dead projects. عمرو بن كلثوم 01:39, 9 October 2011 (UTC)
6. OPPOSE The above will be sufficient enough my friends. InTheRevolution2 23:43, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
7. OPPOSE There's no such thing as "Northwest African Arabic". There's three or four different dialects, that are different from arabic, the only logical solution is to make individual wikipedias for these languages (morrocan, algerian, tunisian and lybian) but not one unified northwest arabic. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.54.130.227 (talk • contribs) .
8. Oppose - This seems analogous to setting up separate wikipedias for American English, Canadian English, Indian English, Sri Lankan English, Singaporean English, Hong Kong English, South African English, Zambian English, Australian English, New Zealand English, etc. The effect would only be to make Wikipedia less useful. M Carling (talk) 11:04, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Other discussion

I'll raise the same issue that I do for all Arabic colloquial proposals -- is there any kind of accepted or established orthography other than ad-hoc attempts to write dialect words using unmodified classical Arabic script? Because such ad-hoc attempts to write dialect with unmodified classical Arabic script are rarely very successful -- and would seem to be especially useless for many Moroccan Arabic vernaculars, which (from things I've seen in the linguistic literature from time to time) have a phonology extremely divergent from Classical Arabic... AnonMoos 07:52, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that Wikipedians have to create a new scipt ? Is it our role ? Who are we to substitute the reality by imagining a new language with a special script ? --Helmoony 08:52, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm saying that unless there are some kind of established or accepted orthographic conventions for writing Northwest African Arabic dialects specifically, then this project is likely to be of rather limited usefulness -- because trying to write Arabic vernacular dialects in an ad-hoc improvised way using classical Arabic orthographic conventions (and probably everybody doing it slightly differently) is a losing game which almost always gives poor results (and seems guaranteed to give extremely poor results for many Moroccan dialects). AnonMoos (talk) 11:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC)