Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian

Mats Blakstad mats.gbproject at gmail.com
Sun Apr 24 19:13:35 CEST 2016


2016-04-24 18:01 GMT+02:00 Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com>:

>
> (* But there are many statements used as evidence that are very
> unconvincing. For example, "According to Melerska (2011) 50% of the
> parents, ... consider Elfdalian to be an independent language." There are
> many cases where people consider their dialect to be a language, as a
> matter of (understandable) pride. That does not establish that it is: the
> distinction between language and dialect need to be based on the objective
> measure of intelligibility, not whether or not speakers "think of it" as a
> language. With all due respect to Mencken, "American" is not a language,
> for example; it is one of many varieties of English.)
>
>
I'm suprised that you find many statements unconvincing, could you be more
specific about which statements you're talking about? The statement you
refer to is of course not a good argument on its own, however; It does not
stand on its own. If you want to have any credibility raising questions
about wheater Elfdalian is a language or not you need to come up with more
than that. The differences between British and American is really like a
small peanut compared with the differences between Swedish and Elfdalian.
Beyond that; The opinions of the locals is also not irrelevant. That 50% in
a survey in Älvdalen consider it as a language is actually quite remarkable
all the time that Elfdalian is codified as a Swedish dialect in the public
sphere, and most people that live in Älvdalen, and many that took part in
the survey, do not themselves speak Elfdalian, many didn't speak about
their own language but about other peoples language. Besides, in Älvdalen
there's a public culture around the language, it's been standardized and is
actively used and maintained by the community, you can of course not ignore
such sociolinguistics realities. I find it strange that you request
information about linguistic intelligibility when information about that is
already present in the document you linked to. If you don't find the
evidences in the application convincing, you need to be looking for errors
with a magnifier and ignore all the attach linguistic literature.

I start to get really tiered of this debate. I think we can debate this
into eternity. I applied for the first subtag for Elfdalian 16 november
2014. After this period there's been an ISO application and now a new
subtag application. I worked on this issue 16 months now, non convincing
arguments about Elfdalian being a Swedish dialect in this period. It is of
course easy to come with critical questions: But why is it always so hard
for those who belove Elfdalian is a Swedish dialect to refer to research
done or articles? If anyone have those arguments or evidences; please come
with them now so we don't need to wait 16 more months. And don't speculate
or expose your lack of knowledge; send academic titles, research done, give
sources that others can check... thats what we did in our application!
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