Criteria for languages?

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 7 00:47:03 CET 2009


Hi, this will be my last post here on Walser and Walliser German as I've gone as far as I can.

 

Yes, agreed, probably content such as at Facebook and Twitter, as well as emails, may be written in the various normally non-written German languages.

(I did a few online places searching for 'Wallisertitsch' instead of for 'Walliserdeutsch'--primarily at facebook--though all I can tell is that the language is related to German:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=28976458984
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=27901141366  (this one's about surfing it seems; but I can't tell you in what language)

However regarding the site you linked to (hmm)--
I could not view the list of links but wonder whether language at the links matches the site language-- perhaps not if these are links to extraneous sites.

 
In any case, as I said, I do wonder whether Walliser German is as close to Walser German as the various English dialects are to each other.)


(But of course I don't believe that North and South Levantine Arabic are that far from each other 
and these have separate language codes now!

 trouble deciding whether Lebanese was North or South Levantine (splitting off the North and South Levantine has introduced a 'can of worms' it seems maybe???  I'm not an expert but I've had this feeling before seeing this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_South_Levantine_Arabic#Arguments_against).


So we have two questions,  the first for the JAC:

 

(1), Should we let Walliser German get its own language subtag rather than being treated, together with Walser German, as variants of a single language that includes only those two varieties at present?



And for the second, (2), what macrolanguage would it be classified under? (that is if it becomes an extention language), in any case, I don't see that we can include Walliser German under Swiss German if the JAC/ ethnologue has separated these--even though some speakers may perceive it as a variety of Swiss German. Is this correct?


For possible macrolanguages there's not only gem and de but also gmw.


If you are looking for a macrolanguage that encompasses both, I think [de] is the best choice--we've had this discussion before--not [gem] or West Germanic.


But with my solution, there is just one language (Walser-Walliser German) and two variants.  I don't know if that will 'fly' or not.

 

 


Best,

C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com


 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20091206/65e1716a/attachment.htm 


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list