Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages

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It has been suggested that WikiProject Language families be merged into this page or section. (Discuss)

Language articles		Importance
Language articles		None	Total
Quality
	FA	9	9
	A	2	2
	GA	14	14
	B	134	134
	C	8	8
	Start	410	410
	Stub	780	780
	List	4	4
	Assessed	1361	1361
	Unassessed	2167	2167
	Total	3528	3528

Shortcut: WP:Lang

This WikiProject aims primarily to provide a consistent treatment of each language on the Wikipedia. Many languages already have extensive pages, and the systematic information on those pages is not presented in a consistent way. The purpose of this WikiProject is to present that information consistently, and to ensure that each of the major areas is covered at least briefly for each language.

These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. However, try to stick to the format for the Infobox for each language. See the template for an example Infobox.

The easiest way to get started writing for a language that doesn't already have an article or to convert an article to the WikiProject format is to start with the template.

1 Related WikiProjects
2 Participants
3 Structure
4 Open tasks
5 Good and featured articles
6 General Strategy and Discussion forum
7 Templates
- 7.1 Message for talkpages
- 7.2 User Template

Related WikiProjects

This WikiProject is a descendant of Wikipedia: WikiProject Linguistics. It has a descendant WikiProject of its own, Wikipedia:WikiProject Endangered languages.

Participants

Gibmetal77: Native English, Spanish and Llanito, advanced French, and basic Maltese and Italian.
RyGuy17
Ciacchi: Icelandic, Italian & Portuguese
Node
Nohat
Danny
Ling.Nut
jeronim
Tox
Secretlondon
ran
Mark Dingemanse (though I must admit that most of my articles aren't laid out according to the language template)
Mustafaa
Ptcamn
Marnen
Garzo
Abbruzzi
Wikiacc
Peter Isotalo: primarily Swedish
Whimemsz
IceKarma
Pablo D. Flores
Conrad Leviston
millosh* (talk (sr:))
Angr
Benjamin
Martin
Aleksei
moyogo
newydd
ntennis (mainly sign languages)
The Great Gavini (uh, does British language (Celtic) count?)
Tanzeel
Dmscvan
Gailtb
Straughn Turkic and languages of the former USSR
Zerida
Enlil Ninlil English, German and Cantonese, also Indigenous Australian languages
Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Chris S. have done major edits to Tagalog & Kapampangan. Slowly working on other Philippine languages.
Anupam (Hindi, Hindustani, and Urdu)
Maunus
Pruneau^talk
Djordje D. Bozovic
Marialadouce
A R King
A12n 20:32, 3 December 2006 (UTC) (African languages) (though like Mark I haven't been following a template, yet)
Geoking66
Yupik (Mainly Sami languages, but also Coptic and Old Nubian)
Surena (Iranian Languages) 06:52, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Womtelo -- Languages of Melanesia
User:WilliamThweatt -- Austronesian languages, Southeast Asian languages, Celtic languages, Slavic language
Francisco Smith-- european languages particularly german, english and spanish
N-true — mainly Caucasian languages and perhaps also Khoisan languages and/or some Amerindian ones...
trwier - Mainly Caucasian languages, as well as the Algonquian language family.
Geoking66
Sborsody
Alastair Haines 14:31, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Khanele (Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian)
Neranei

Please feel free to add your username to this list if you have worked on converting pages to the WikiProject Languages format.

*Kutaka(-lu) 20:06, 20 April 2007 (UTC) New Guinean and Australian languages, especially taxonomy and historical phonology.
Michkalas
Muckapædia 15^e mai 2007, 23h49 (UTC+0900) :: mostly orthographies and Canadian languages and dialects.
Sr 13 Some French, very little Chinese and Hawaiian.
MichelleG
Moonbug
Dan Parvaz - Semitic languages, Signed languages, Languages of the Middle East, Language and Gesture
kk_loach
Tea and crumpets
Korenyuk — Українська, Закарпатський говір, Нохчийн, Davvisápmi, ქართული, Қазақша, bokmål, Wolof; Lakĥoṫiyapi, kainunkieli, Turkic languages, Mongolic languages and some others (the first eight being either my Mother tongues, my children's (with three adopted daughters) and my wife's or those spoken where I was born and where I live(d), plus special dedication to "Lakĥol") — as much as I would be able to, due to poor health reasons
Jckrull
Polylerus
01:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
Francis Tyers ·
Jsferreira - Caribbean languages (official, indigenous, creole, immigrant)
Jangari - Australianist syntactician - non-pama-nyungan languages
LiangHH - Chinese Mandarin, Spanish, German
Landroving Linguist - Languages of Ethiopia
Akerbeltz - Goidelic, Amerindian
JWB (talk) 02:34, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
Robskin - Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, English, French, and my mother-tongue, Portuguese Robskin (talk) 05:37, 25 January 2008 (UTC).
Aelffin (talk · contribs) - English, German, some Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Icelandic, and other germanic languages.
Taivo - Numic languages of Uto-Aztecan, phonologies of other languages
Gr8opinionater
W Tanoto - Indonesian and Javanese (both first language), english, french (both advance), italian, spanish, japanese, very basic chinese. Read Japanese kana script fluently, basic greek script
Umofomia - Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)
Hakeem.gadi (talk) 11:58, 10 March 2008 (UTC). Arabic, Libyan Arabic, English, Japanese.
Gimme danger (talk · contribs) - Tibetan language and related articles.
Szfski (talk · contribs) - Semitic and Indo-European, especially Slavic and varieties of Arabic. Also dialects of American English.
(Go Wolverines!) 20:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC) - understand Scots, know a little Middle English, understand some Spanish
Alton (talk · contribs)
Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haider Rizvi (talk) 14:27, 23 July 2008 (UTC), native speker of Hindustani,Awadhi,Urdu,Hindi
Hurmata
Jomeara421 - Algonquian languages
Dmitri Lytov - history of writing, theoretical linguistics, various languages, interwiki, multilingual articles
Widsith (talk) 07:17, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
User:Coldipa - South Slavic languages
User:Vinsfan368 Former Canadian, studying French
C21K - mainly Kannada,Tulu & Konkani languages
Anypodetos – mostly PIE

Structure

Most language articles should be on a page titled XXX language. Reasons for this recommendation:

Ambiguity. While some language have special forms that refer unambiguously to the language, English is inherently ambiguous about language names. Having a standard of "XXX language" ensures that it's always unambiguous. There is always the possibility of "XXX literature", "XXX grammar", but these cannot be referred to simply as "XXX", and so are not a reason for disambiguation.
Precedent. This is how Encyclopædia Britannica and many other English-language encyclopedias name their articles.

Please note that when there is nothing to disambiguate a language name from, such as Hindi, Esperanto or Inuktitut, there is no need for the "language". See Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Languages, both spoken and programming and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages) for the relevant naming policy.

Whether the varieties of Arabic and Chinese should be called "languages" or "dialects" continues to be a highly controversial issue. The current convention is: use NAME + Arabic for Arabic varieties (e.g. Egyptian Arabic), use NAME (linguistics) for Chinese varieties (e.g. Mandarin (linguistics)). Infoboxes are put at both Arabic and Chinese language and at their first-level subdivisions.

Even in cases in which there is a consensus that varieties of a language have a dialect status, the number and divisions between such dialects are often vaguely-defined, and controversies exist among dialectologists over whether certain varieties should be treated in a unified way or are best understood as separate though related varieties. Separate articles should only be written on varieties (e.g., Estuary English) or related groups of varieties (e.g., Hispanic English) that have been well-enough studied by linguists that at least a minimal body of literature exists about that variety or group of varieties, as a distinct dialect or group of dialects. Phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexical variation that may be considered subdialectal should be noted as "differences within X dialect,", where X is a dialect as discussed in the relevant literature. Controversies over dialect status can be noted in articles as such, but should also be based on citable work. Names used to refer to that dialect in the title should be preferred over folk-linguistic terms (e.g., Inland North versus Midwestern Accent).

Open tasks

Articles to be created

Hill Mari language, now it is redirecting to Mari language.
Slavic microlanguages ru:Славянские микроязыки

I'm on the ball. Coming very soon. Szfski (talk) 08:01, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Got a good part of the article translated. More later Szfski (talk) 23:27, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Kalapuya
Shoalwater
Lingua Franca (language) (or perhaps putting the language at Lingua Franca and moving the current article elsewhere)
- I'll comment in a sub-bullet (feel free to move to the discussion page): I was looking for any mention of "language of wider communication" (LWC) on Wikipedia and did not find it. LWC is, as I understand it, pretty much the same idea as lingua france (concept). To be honest I don't know about the history of use of LWC rather than lingua franca, but had assumed it to be a recent coinage until just recently seeing it in an academic article published in 1962. It's an established term: Could it somehow be useful in splitting the Lingua Franca article (assuming I understand correctly that that is being discussed)? --A12n 12:59, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
  - Our article on languages of wider communication is at Lingua franca (lower-case f); our article on the language is at Mediterranean Lingua Franca. Is anything still missing? —An gr 20:44, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Requests for expansion

And everything in Category:Language stubs and its subcategories.

Images for articles in Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of languages.

Requests for attention

Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Linguistics
Category:Wikipedia articles with nonstandard pronunciation (Contain nonstandard pronunciation information which should be rewritten using the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
Kabyle (Requested assistance in English grammar clarification, which I have done but do not mind if people review VelaenOscuridad 22:58, 9 May 2007 (UTC))
Icelandic language (Needs general cleanup and expansion) Max Naylor 15:02, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
(Sorry but I don't know where to put this, please move this to the appropriate place) - I noticed that some language articles provide no citations for the "number of speakers" in their infobox, and furthermore, that these numbers and the "language rank" usually contradict the page "List of languages by number of speakers", which itself provides citations. I'd just like to bring this to your attention, as I think many infoboxes probably provide uncited and innacurate info but I don't have the time or know-how to fix it. Althena (talk) 07:33, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Afrikaans needs attention. I've outlined some of the issues with it on the talk page there. Sectori (talk) 00:05, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

And the articles in Category:Languages articles needing expert attention

Articles proposed for deletion

including WP:AFD, WP:PROD and other processes

Requested moves

There is a request to move Early Modern Irish to Classical Gaelic. Discussion is at Talk:Early Modern Irish#Requested move. —An gr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 13:27, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Good and featured articles

Good articles

Good article candidates

General Strategy and Discussion forum

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages

Templates

Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages/Template
See this dynamic list for pages that use the language infobox.

Message for talkpages

Please add {{WP Languages}} to talk pages of relevant articles. Currently, it displays the following:

WikiProject Languages

Language portal

This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Languages, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, and easy-to-use resource about languages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

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This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.

Articles with this template are put into Category:WikiProject Languages articles.

To rate the article on the quality scale, add one of the following parameters:

class=FA for featured articles
class=A for A-class articles
class=GA for good articles
class=B for B-class articles
class=start for Start-class articles
class=stub for Stub-class articles (which may not necessarily have a "stub" message on them!)
class=NA for non-articles (templates, images, etc.)

See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment for guidelines on assessing article quality.

User Template

After you sign up, you can add the project userbox to your user page by adding the following: {{User WikiProject Languages}}. The template pictured below will appear: