Jump to content

Requests for new languages/Wikipedia American Norwegian

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
submitted verification final decision

This proposal has been rejected.
This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page.

A committee member provided the following comment:

No language code. But please see my closing comment below. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:19, 11 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
  • The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
  • The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:
What Value Example / Explanation
Proposal
Language code no (SILGlottolog) A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name American Norwegian Language name in English
Language name Amerikanst Norst Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item Q9043 - item has currently the following values:
Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality no indication Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.

Settings
Project name Wikipedia "Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace "Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads no Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons.
If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin").
Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone America/New York "Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

Proposal

[edit]

I have requested this on behalf of a friend, he’s not very good at using Wiki things. He has written an argument in favour of the request.

Paragraph:

American Norwegian is a collection of Norwegian dialects which have evolved in complete isolation within the United States for up to a couple centuries. During that time, Norwegian has had time to evolve on its own, on a different hemisphere than the rest of the Norwegians. Although Norwegians from Norway may be able to understand the Norwegian spoken by us Norwegian Americans, we aren't able to understand them as well as they can us. American Norwegian is quickly dying out in favor of the English majority. Many Norwegian Americans have learned Norwegian in order to feel more connected to their heritage, but that's not the same tongue. As one of the youngest native speakers of American Norwegian to this day, I can tell that it's evolved quite differently. Enough for me to not be able to understand most of the Norwegian spoken in Norway in speech, and I still even need a translator for understanding it in written form. In the past 200 years of isolation, it has evolved to the point of mutual unintelligibility to an asymmetric extent, with drifted grammar and numerous English loanwords. I don't wish for this special tongue to go extinct, and I am one of the last of my generation to be able to speak it as a native. I wish for people to learn and be exposed to this unique variant of Norwegian in order to let people know it exists, and that Norwegian isn't just spoken in Norway. Hopefully, Norwegian Americans proud of their heritage would learn this, in order to feel much closer as both an American and a Norwegian.

Links:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-PP0r8ohF8> <https://www.norwegianamerican.com/featured/norwegian-americas-hidden-dialects/> <https://brill.com/view/journals/jlc/10/1/article-p5_2.xml?lang=en> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language#/media/File:Norwegian_Language.png> (to show that Norwegian is spoken in Minnesota on the map)

We hope that you look into the situation further and consider our request. Thank you. YoungstownToast (talk) 18:56, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

[edit]
  • Oppose We have a Norwegian Wikipedia which can be written in all dialects of Norwegian. Also, there's no valid ISO code. Random Wikimedian (talk) 12:38, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It will be unlikely this request will be accepted in the near future. For now, I propose you start working on some material on Incubator Plus 2.0, which works the same as Wikimedia. --OosWesThoesBes (talk) 16:35, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Norwegian Wikipedia is expected to be written in one of the two standards, either Nynorsk or Bokmål. We don't adhere to either. Written dialect is not always favourably looked upon and is often seen as uneducated or vernacular. I'm not going to post articles in what seems like a written dialect to other Norwegians just for it to be criticized. The lack of a valid ISO code doesn't rule out dialects. In the policy, it says that dialects can be written with the same ISO code as their standard language. Since American Norwegian is a dialect of Norwegian, it is perfectly understandable for the ISO code to be the Norwegian ISO code. There are other dialects on Wikipedia which lack specific ISO codes.

--YoungstownToast (talk) 15:09, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose That said, no code no project. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 00:13, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Closing comment

[edit]

I understand the proposer's point here. To some extent, OP is suggesting that this has become a bit like Riograndenser Hunsrückisch. If that's true, though, then SIL should be willing to give it a language code. (If you try that, and succeed, come back to us with a new request.)

If that's not really true, then try to determine if this is closer to Nynorsk or to Bokmål, and see if one of those projects is willing to let you start a dialect subproject. This does happen in a number of projects. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:19, 11 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]