Re: [Ietf-languages] Fwd: Proposal for variant language subtags for German dialects

[Hugh Paterson III <[e-mail]>]

>Another project that the tags will be very useful for is a
geo-referenced bibliography for areal linguistics (GOBA;
https://regionalsprache.de/inhalte_bibliographie.aspx), which can be
accessed through this link:
https://regionalsprache.de/GOBA/Catalogue.aspx. With this
bibliography, it is possible to search for literature by geographical
data, e.g. language regions or coordinates. We would also like to make
a standardized set of tags for language regions available for
searching this database. So the language tags would not only benefit
the Deutscher Sprachatlas, but the German-language community of
variationist linguists as a whole.

I appreciate the great amount of effort and planning that has gone into
this resource development. As a linguist I am very happy to see this work
being done. However as an Information Professional working in language
archives, I am concerned with the assumed proposition that dialect regions
are "areas" in a geographical sense. Dialects are mapped to language
entities not geographical spaces. People live in geographical spaces – and
people move. Language Resources can evidence a speech variety at a
particular point in time but pinning a dialect to a geo-location is like
pinning a cloud on a map... clouds move too. Östen Dahl in the case of
language maps argues that shape files or regions are less prefered to GIS
point notation. The ability to lump points together in different ways is a
user facing search function within a specific user-interface and a specific
user experience. The repository system you are working on needs to support
custom regions as a facet and reference point based data on the resource's
record. Using dialect as a proxy for a GIS based search is a bad idea for
sustainability on the technical side.

Östen Dahl & Ljuba Veselinova. 2006. Language Map Server. In Proceedings of
the 25th International User Conference, ESRI. San Diego: ESRI Press.
https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/language_ms1of2.html

Kind regards,
Hugh

On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 8:16 AM Lisa Dücker <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Then I will gladly abide by the principles of the BCP 47 and have all
> the alemannic tags go with the prefix gsw.
>
>
> Zitat von John Cowan <[e-mail]>:
>
> > On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 7:43 AM Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >> >linguistically speaking, they are varieties of the German
> >> > language.
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >>  I defer to your expertise here but I'm afraid the ship has already
> >> sailed. In ISO 639, alemannic languages have tag gsw, not de.
> >>
> >
> > Indeed.  It would violate the principles of BCP 47 to tag Alemannic as a
> > whole using "gsw" and Highest Alemannic as "de-alemhist"; the latter has
> to
> > be "gsw-alemhist".
> >
> > Furthermore, the distinction between a language and a dialect is not a
> > linguistic one:  "a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot" (Max
> > Weinreich, quoting an otherwise unknown New York City high school
> teacher),
> > a sentence which is probably intelligible to most Germans but is not in
> the
> > German language.
>
>
>
> --
> Lisa Dücker
> Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin
> regionalsprache.de (REDE)
> Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas
> Philipps-Universität Marburg
>
> sie/ihr
>
>