General discussion

This thread is for discussing things that affect the groups identity, way of working, aspirations, etc...

I open it for a discussion about the criteria we should use.

Initially I opened this group with the intention to include strictly endangered languages. I am no expert, so I looked for some sources (At the beginning just Wikipedia and Unesco Red Book on Endangered languages)

At the very beginning Joan Ponce made another proposal by PM to include those languages that face "strong pressures". I mentioned it in the suggestion thread:

"The idea is that besides the languages that are endangered in the short term and appear in the studies linked in the group description, there are many other languages that are under strong pressure and even if their situation is not so urgent they are in fact endangered or lessened."

I liked it and nobody opposed at that moment so we went for it.

Initially I identified those languages with the revived languages, but later I decided to accept any proposal for a language living diglossia, as the main point of this new criteria shouldn't be to congratulate those who have been able to overcome the danger (even if they deserve my admiration), but to rise awareness of all the languages in the world that are being oppressed in a way or another, looking at the problem with a wider point of view.

Now it seems that we might have gone too far, in the answers to WELGR 07 sanaag says:

"How practical is it to include Lingala or other (relatively) dynamic languages in this tribe? The sheer number of bands using this language could probably overwhelm artists singing in endangered languages. This could eventually lead to a wide digression from the original purpose of the tribe."

This is a very valid point that deserves further discussion.

We face a non trivial problem, were do we put the limit of "living under pressure"?

I expect your opinions.

EVERYTHING SAID HERE IS DEBATABLE

Living: endangered and potentially endangered

Let's try to set a criteria:

A language with natural speakers is a living language regardless of the number of speakers.

- EL (endangered language): The criteria to consider a living language endangered is complex, As for us, our criteria should be "an expert said that it's endangered".

- PEL (Potentially endangered language): A signal of potential danger is the phenomena called diglossia, to make it easy we can consider as PEL any language that has to compete with a stronger language in it's main territory

For example, Lingala in Congo must compete with French, it's a PEL, but Suomi doesn't fit under this definition even if it has fewer speakers in total than Lingala, because in it's main territory it's the main language.

Corrections to make:
- "Kuanua" should be considered as PEL under this criteria.
- Not sure about "Finnish sign language".

--- ---

How should we work

- We should talk here about natural living languages. That means that Esperanto and "invented" languages (artificial), Latin and Sumerian (Extinct) remain as guests.

- We should talk clear and separate strict ELs and PELs in the overview, and mention the situation of the language in the WELGR (and whatever else we make).

- We should give priority to ELs, but not exclude PELs, for example talk about a PEL only each 3 WELGRs (or whatever number we find appropriate).

- Artists connections should be for strict ELs

--- ---

Radio

As far as I know the group radio is automatically made according to our common listening habits (that unsurprisingly are biased towards mainstream artists singing in English.)

If we want a radio made by us we can use the same method that Pixies Palace is using: A single user uses a tag and we put a link to that tag of that user, see:
http://www.last.fm/group/Pixies+Palace
example:
http://www.last.fm/listen/usertags/Pixieguts/pixies%20palace

I would make 3 tag-radios
- Endangered language
- Potentially endangered language
- Both EL and PEL

--- ---


Please discuss.

Tartalo

If I'm not mistaken, ethnologue's 'living' means indirectly that the language is not in danger regardless of the nr. of speakers. That's where my surprise in the earlier reaction comes from.


As far as I know Ethnologue's scope are living languages meaning that "it has native speakers" including those endangered, but they don't try to give this kind of information inside Ethnologue, except for nearly extint languages.

The best source I know for this information is still UNESCO Red book of endangered languages.

I'll go a bit offtopic now, but by looking for this information I discovered / confirmed some interesting things:

1) Ethnologue shouldn't be our only source

Ethnologue sometimes goes against general linguistic community consensus. There is a clash between ISO 639-1 & ISO 639-2 language codes and Ethnologue's own classification of languages. They have mapped it themselves, and even proposed a new standard: ISO 693-3

Ethnologue's purpose in it's beginning was also not scientific, it was made with the purpose of discovering which languages missed a translation of the Bible. SIL is a Christian organization rather than a scientific organization. However, it's still the best freely available language catalogue I've found, we should use it with caution and contrast the information given there with more scientific sources whenever possible.

We should also not forget that the classification of what is a dialect and what a language is often a political issue.

2) Esperanto does have native speakers, so I guess I'm moving it to potentially endangered languages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/science/19lang.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1


I second this idea [radio]. I never tagged anything but I'll start as soon as I know which tags we're going to use.


I propose these tags:
- Endangered Language
- Potentially Endangered Language
- Minority Language (For EL+PEL)

That means that for example an artist singing in Basque would carry 3 tags:
- Basque
- Endangered Language
- Minority language

For those artists singing in more than one language it would be better if we tagged only the songs in which the language in question is used. If we don't have the information we can tag the whole artist and put a request for help in our forum's appropriate discussion thread to correct it latter.

I understand that you are willing to take this on to your back, so the radio would be based in your tagging. Is this OK?

Tartalo

That's OK, I will take care of the radio it doesn't mean much extra work.

I'll use just one tag: "Minority language"

First I did a bold tagging (whole artists). Now, when an song in a imperial language appears in the radio I delete the artist's tag and go song by song, sometimes I don't know nor the artist nor the language, so there are probably lots of errors.

If you saw anything that should be corrected please comment.

I was thinking about this dilution of the idea too.

Changing the name now that we already have hundreds of artists and individual songs tagged is not something I like, but I am considering a separate radio with only endangered languages, therefore the artists singing in endangered languages would have double exposition.

I am a bit busy now for it, but it might happen soon.

Sorry, misunderstood you, I thought you were talking about the tag.

Well, all endangered languages are minorized / minority languages, aren't they? It's a bigger group that contains endangered languages. It's more or less the same proposal you made just using "Minority language" instead of "ELGL" as tag. I'll anyway add an explanation text under the picture to make it clear.

I agree when you say "it's rather strange that the original concept of "endangered languages" is not clearly depicted on the radio!" that's why the second radio idea.

I'm the owner of LingWiki.com, and one of our goals that I believe we have in common with EL is the preservation of endangered languages and generating awareness thereof. While I'm a bit new to last.fm, I think there are ways we can work together to make both resources stronger, such as developing and linking to LingWiki articles to help give background on languages or cite key words from lyrics and the like. Got some great stuff up so far, and I'm excited to see what develops!