Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)

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[edit] Proposed addition

Wikipedia practice is to pluralize articles on language families. This practice is already covered at some places in our naming conventions; for example, language families are mentioned as a common exception to the rule at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals). The rationale is that this is a case in which the term is always in a plural form in English. Anyone ever heard about 'the African language' or 'the Indo-European language'? I propose to be clear about this and to add the following to this convention:

Language families and groups of languages are pluralized. Thus, Niger-Congo languages rather than 'Niger-Congo language', and Sino-Tibetan languages rather than 'Sino-Tibetan language'. In most cases, a redirect from the singular to the plural title is not needed, as normal English usage of the term is always plural. There are even cases where a redirect would be incorrect; compare Kalenjin languages and Kalenjin language.

Any thoughts? Improved wordings? Additions? — mark ✎ 30 June 2005 12:08 (UTC)

This seems like good common sense, Mark. Sino-Tibetan language makes sense in English if we understand language as refering to means of communication. However, our usual understanding is that a language is one particular form of such communication, and, thus, languages makes more sense. Setting up redirects from the singular to the plural form as we go our wiki-way is useful in preventing someone reinventing a page, broken links and new-page vandalism. It's good you've spotted the, albeit rare, occassion when the name of a language group is the same as that of one language. I wonder if there are any exceptions to this rule: when languages isn't appropriate. I can't think of any. Good stuff. --Gareth Hughes 30 June 2005 12:35 (UTC)
I think the issue isn't so much "XX languages"/"XX language" but rather "XX languages"/"XX language family". The latter isn't used at all, but I do think it's an issue of sorts. However, it wouldn't work well for "Palaeo-Siberian languages" -> "Palaeo-Siberian language family"... ---Node 30 June 2005 16:15 (UTC)
"XXX language family" just looks cumbersome and forced to me. The plural seems to be the most logical and practical to me.
Peter Isotalo July 1, 2005 09:57 (UTC)
I can understand that in certain circumstances it may be preferable to use the title X language family, but this takes us onto the rocky ground of language classification. The words family, sub-family, group and sub-group are variously used to indicate a hierarchy of classification. A good number of classification theories are disputed. Therefore, X languages simply tells us that the article is about languages that can collectively be called X. Basically, I'm saying that the shorter name introduces some useful fuzziness in our definition - it's far easier to let the article deal with disputations and theories than the article title. --Gareth Hughes 1 July 2005 12:59 (UTC)
This is where I stand, for the record. --Merovingian (t) (c) July 1, 2005 15:15 (UTC)
a special case was Greek languages, because in the case of Greek it is customary to speak of Greek dialects. Otherwise, I suppose this is just a corollary of "common use" make "X language family" a redirect, and do disambiguation only in cases where the singular is a different article, as in Greek language. dab (ᛏ) 1 July 2005 15:52 (UTC)
hi. this is ok with me.
as mentioned above, there is a problematic ambiguity in certain cases of xxx language and xxx languages referring to different things. this is not so good, i think. so, restricting the singular to a single language & the plural to more than one language would prevent and additionally it seems to be rather intuitive.
i do note that xxx languages is ambiguous in that it could refer to either a genetic grouping (that may or may not be controversial) or another type of grouping, such as areal or cultural or typological or something else. regarding genetic groupings, there are, after all, two things that can be referred to, namely, the language family or the individual members of the language family. Wikipedia has so far used xxx languages to refer to any grouping (this statement is provisional in that i havent carefully examined the consistency of this practice). so, either we can continue this as before or be very explicit and change every article to xxx language family. then, we can leave xxx languages for other types of groupings (even though that the exact relationships in these articles would remain ambiguous). but, any article about a genetic language family will most probably make reference to its individual language members. so... on a practical note, we would have to type all of this every time we wanted to link to these articles, so... maybe we can live with this ambiguity. (however, we shouldnt live with the xxx language/xxx languages ambiguity since it is a bit worse, i think). peace – ishwar  (speak) 2005 July 1 21:13 (UTC)
by the way, why doesnt someone check out the way other encyclopedias do things? sometimes it is nice if certain writing genres are comfortably uniform, i.e. do we want wikipedia to be an oddball? (i'm not saying that it is). peace – ishwar  (speak) 2005 July 1 21:22 (UTC)
I actually did check that, and XXX languages is by far the most common way other encyclopedias handle this, which is another reason why I would argue for us putting it in our naming conventions. As Gareth and you point out, XXX languages leaves the actual nature of the grouping (genetic or geographic) an open question, and I regard that as an important advantage. XXX language family is really too cumbersome and is bound to get us into problems as far as controversial groupings are concerned. — mark ✎ 1 July 2005 23:51 (UTC)

Thank you all for tuning in. Our discussion seems to confirm my view that Wikipedia practice as it stands now already is the most intuitive and practical way to handle this, and that nothing stands in the way of updating the naming conventions accordingly. Does anyone have comments on the wording of my proposal and the choice of examples? — mark ✎ 1 July 2005 23:51 (UTC)

I have updated the relevant pages of our Naming Conventions. — mark ✎ 3 July 2005 10:01 (UTC)

I guess I'm too late to contribute to this discussion, but I would like to point out that people do say "the Indo-European language" to mean "the Proto-Indo-European language", and that while people may rarely say "the Celtic language", articles do sometimes have sentences like "Irish is a Celtic language" and it would be nice to format that as "Irish is a [[Celtic language]]" rather than "Irish is a [[Celtic languages|Celtic language]]" all the time. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 6 July 2005 14:56 (UTC)

Isn't that what redirects are for?
Peter Isotalo July 6, 2005 19:41 (UTC)
Volta-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Bantoid are a few redirects I made back when piped links didn't work in tables; I do like those more than redirects like Volta-Congo language etc., mainly because I only link the 'Volta-Congo' part when saying things like "X is a Volta-Congo language". Angr, you are right, it's a bit tedious to wikilink those things right now — but I don't think we should let that influence our naming conventions. — mark ✎ 6 July 2005 21:14 (UTC)
Redirects may work for some of them, but [[Celtic]] doesn't a redirect to [[Celtic languages]], it redirects to [[Celtic (disambiguation)]], which lets you know that in addition to the people and their languages, there are also sports teams called Celtic or The Celtics. [[Celtic language]] redirects to [[Celtic languages]], though, so I guess I could use that. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 7 July 2005 06:49 (UTC)

[edit] language varieties and groups thereof

I find the naming conventions for languages not to be very helpful, since they don't mention varieties at all.

Take for instance German varieties found in the family tree of the article West Germanic languages: We find the following schemes being used for subgroups of languages (I'm referring to the actual names of the articles, not to the names used on the page):

  1. XXX, for instance Austro-Bavarian
  2. XXX language, for instance Alemannic language
  3. XXX [parent language name], for instance High German
  4. XXX [parent language name] language, for instance Central German language
  5. XXX [parent language name] languages, for instance Upper German languages

In the same family tree, the following schemes are used for individual varieties:

  1. XXX, for instance Wymysojer (what's that?)
  2. XXX language, for instance Limburgish language
  3. XXX dialect, for instance Silesian dialect
  4. XXX [parent language], for instance Basel German
  5. XXX [parent language] language, for instance Pennsylvania German language

With regards to varieties of the English language, there is luckily less confusion of naming schemes, the de facto standard seemingly being XXX [parent language] (that is, XXX English), both for subgroups and for individual varieties, as can be seen on the pages linked on the List of dialects of the English language. There are very few exceptions that use the scheme XXX, such as Received pronunciation (most of the XXX schemes, however, don't link to varieties of English, but to regions or ethnic groups, such as Dorset or Cockney). I have not found any English variety or group of varieties whose naming scheme would include language(s) or dialect(s), which makes a sharp contrast to the varieties of German discussed above.

I favour the de facto naming standard for English varieties and groups of varieties, XXX [parent language]. There are several advantages of the scheme XXX [parent language]:

  • It avoids the delicate term dialect.
  • It does not distinguish between a group of varieties and an individual variety, which is in most cases a question of interpretation (Southern American English can be referred to either as a group of varieties or as a special variety).
  • It specifies at once what language the variety belongs to.

Of course, varieties that are being used as standard languages of their own right should be named according to the existing scheme XXX language, for instance Luxembourgish language or Yiddish language. -- j. 'mach' wust | ‽ 11:25, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

These are some good points. I would support the scheme XXX parent (i.e. Standard Yoruba, Anlo Ewe) for language varieties and I think it is a good idea to add something to the conventions to this effect. — mark ✎ 07:52, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Programming language suffix

I was surprised to find that this naming convention appears to mandate the use of the suffix programming language for disambiguation (à la Scheme programming language, SML programming language etc.). I had assumed that on Wikipedia the usage of a parenthesed suffix (à la Scheme (programming language) and SML (programming language)) was standard for disambiguation. Even more surprising, the naming convention appears to mandate the creation of redirect pages using the parenthesed suffix?? -- Tobias Bergemann 20:38, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, dear. After browsing the (archived) discussions at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)/Archive 2 I am not sure I really want to open that can of worms again. Nevermind. -- Tobias Bergemann 20:49, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dialects

The convention says nothing about dialects. Every so often someone wants to rename 'X language' to 'X dialect' for the reason that it is not 'a language in its own right'. I find the use of an absolute definition of 'dialect' impossible, and so would advise that we simply do not use the word in article titles. Does anyone else want a statement to this effect added to the convention? --Gareth Hughes 16:41, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion, there is a wide and substantiated agreement on numerous varieties to be varieties of another language. I consider this ought to be reflected on Wikipedia; we shouldn't just lump everything together as languages. I admit I certainly have a bias on one hand as linguist of–on the other hand—a language with very marked regional variance (German).
I understand that the term dialect is very problematic, and that's the reason why I've proposed above the naming scheme "XXX [parent language]", for instance Estuary English or Bernese German. -- j. 'mach' wust | ✑ 17:46, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Speaking in my capacity as a student of Linguistics, I can safely assure you that there is no linguistic criteria for distinguishing between a language and a dialect. See my user page for some quotes. :) - FrancisTyers 23:59, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Speaking in my capacity as a student of Linguistics, I can safely assure that certain varieties are classified by their speakers as dialects of a certain language. Likewise, there are plenty of Wikipedia articles that contain the word "dialect" in their title. For sure, there cannot be a clearcut definition for the distinction between dialects and languages, but you can research why certain varieties are considered dialects. ― j. 'mach' wust | ⚖ 15:11, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Language histories

There's two ways of naming language histories at the moment:

  1. History of XXX
  2. History of the XXX langauge

The latter seems to be more common, but no centralized discussion has been conducted. I tried putting this on the agenda by making a proposal in the language template and starting a thread over at the project talkpage, but I suppose it's better if he had the discussion here.

The arguments I've seen so far are that 2. is better because it looks better and is supposedely less ambiguous. My own preference is 1. because I like concise article titles and because wordage that isn't actually necessary should always be avoided. Yet another argument has been that the title should follow the formula used by the individual language articles, but I must say that I'd rather have consistent naming even if I didn't agree with the format.

Peter Isotalo 12:17, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I'd prefer (1), as long as it is unambiguous, which it will almost always be. As per general principle of Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:00, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why is "language" suffix rather than standard disambiguation?

Why is the convention/guideline for languages to use the suffix language without parenthesis, rather than the WP standard disambiguation specified in a parenthetic remark? To make this guideline more in line with common widespread Wikipedia standards, how about changing this guideline accordingly? That would including making changes such as the following:

Thoughts/comments? --Serge 22:40, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

It's mostly based on how other encyclopedias name their langauge articles and because it's more intuitive to link to them without having to pipe it. I don't see the merit in changing a simple standard into a more complicated one just to make it slightly more uniform.
Peter Isotalo 11:31, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
The existing convention appears adequate. -Will Beback · † · 22:30, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Agree with Will Beback and Peter; the current convention seems fine. — mark ✎ 22:47, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
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