Dalecarlian is recognised by Ethnologue. And according to the information provided, some 1500 people speak it. It is the first time that I did look up a record in Ethnologue to find that it does not exist in the ISO-639-3.
I looked it up because someone volunteers to localise MediaWiki in Betawiki. The question is, what to do with such a request. The first thing to realise is that the dlc code is unlikely to be ever used as an ISO-639-3 code. The second thing is that it IS a living linguistic entity and, it will be not too hard to argue that if it is not a lanugage, it is at least a dialect.
So allowing for the localisation of Dalecarlian is not problematic. From a standards point of view, there is only one issue to be resolved. What is the correct code that we should use for it?
Thanks,
GerardM
2 comments:
More than a year ago I mailed SIL asking why this is. Their answer was that Ethnologue used an unpublished version of ISO 639-3 as its base, and that [dlc] Dalecarian was removed along with [scy] Scanian before its publishment. Therefore, the codes do not even appear in the ISO 639-3 “change log”.
Now, the reason these codes were removed is what worries me. The codes were not removed because these languages didn’t qualify as languages, but because – hold on – the Swedish government threatened not to ratify ISO 639-3 unless SIL removed these codes.
So in other words, the “impartial” source that we in the language committee use as our platform, does in fact succumb to political pressure. This is not good.
In my mind there is not a single doubt that [dlc] Dalecarlian (Elfdalian) is a separate language – it is very different from Swedish, and as far as I can tell, it is much closer to Old Norse or Icelandic than what it is to Swedish. About [scy] Scanian, however, I am quite skeptical as to its qualifications as a separate language. Once it may have been, but today it is just a distinct dialect of Swedish. I have no more difficulty understanding Scanian than understanding standard Swedish, but it is easy to tell them apart.
According to the rules of the ISO-639 standard, the code dlc will not be used for anything but Dalecarlian.
The issue on how to deal with languages linguistic entities will change considerably when the ISO-639-6 happens. Dalecarlian will not be considered a language by its inclusion it will be a linguistic entity like any other. It will require existence in the ISO-639-3 to be decisively called a language.
Thanks,
GerardM
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