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We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).

Nice link. Here's one with a bit more overview: The keyword here is 'finno-ugric', which is the name of the language family to which Hungarian and Finnish (and a lot of other languages) belong.

The parent of this thread was mistaken about the peoples since there is no evidence that the Hungarian and Finnish peoples are related, just the languages; in fact the modern day Hungarians do not seem to be descended from any one distinct ethnicity. I'm too lazy too find links, but I'm sure the more industrious and curious among you can find something on the web.

-Chris

English is not a language... [because it]... is a large collection of idiomatic expressions that changes quite rapidly

Fair enough, English changes rapidly alright, but how would you define a language? A set of logical syntactic and semantic rules that haven't changed for the past few thousand years? I can think of only two languages like that, Latin and Sanskrit.

Nope, I can't agree with your assertion; language is much more than mere (unchanging) grammar. In many multi-cultural places, it is a strong factor for socio-political identities; throughout history, communities have fought against great powers to assert their linguistic identities.

Stop harping on Americans for being largely mono-lingual. "Why didn't the Romans learn the local languages when they controlled Europe? Because they didn't have to." If every state spoke a different language, which would be more akin to Europe, then there would be need.

Of course, like in other countries, most of these languages will probably end up as an anthropologist's museum specimens, but really, mono-lingualism of most educated Americans is not because you speak only English in the US. It's mostly because the numbers of other languages aren't quite there.

Which brings us to a very interesting conjecture; I'm no American, (nor have I visited the area in question, so I appreciate responses on this) but if I may hazard a guess, by 2030's, learning Spanish will be essential to live in most of south and south-western US. That is to say, I assert that the current pre-dominance of English in the US is only a historical accident, one that will change with shifting demographics.

FWIW, according to The Ethnologue (which got its info from the 1990 Census), there were 148,530 Navajo speakers in the US in 1990. Looks like that number's up to 178,014 in the 2000 Census.

If you don't want to name your own language because it might focus too much on just a single one, then perhaps you might list several, maybe including your own or maybe not, that give a general idea of how you feel about it. Or perhaps just tell us how many people are currently speaking it. You can get some references for that in Ethnologue: Languages of the World. For example, one small language, Frisian, has 700,000 speakers and is rather unknown through most of the world. Is yours smaller or larger than this?

If you don't want to name your own language because it might focus too much on just a single one, then perhaps you might list several, maybe including your own or maybe not, that give a general idea of how you feel about it. Or perhaps just tell us how many people are currently speaking it. You can get some references for that in Ethnologue: Languages of the World. For example, one small language, Frisian, has 700,000 speakers and is rather unknown through most of the world. Is yours smaller or larger than this?

The Ethnologue is a great language resource with information about pretty much every language spoken on the planet organized by language family and also by country. If you enjoy learning about languages and how they relate to each other it's a great resource.

The best and most complete online language reference for over 6,800 languages is "Ethnologue: Languages of the World", created by SIL International.

The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.

UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.

Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.

For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.

Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.

Why? What good does that do? But since you care, it's in Luo, and is just copied from jaluo.com. Not that that helps you understand what it says...

Did you know that 50% of public school students in the state of Uttar Pradesh fail their exams, probably because they're taught in a language that is not their mother tongue?

I agree that English is by far becoming ubiquitous in India, but to say that they're more people who can't speak in English is a major denial of sorts.

It's even worse than saying that the United States and the United Kingdom speak only English, or that France speaks only French.

Did you know that 50% of public school students in the state of Uttar Pradesh fail their exams, probably because they're taught in a language that is not their mother tongue?

I agree that English is by far becoming ubiquitous in India, but to say that they're more people who can't speak in English is a major denial of sorts.

It's even worse than saying that the United States and the United Kingdom speak only English, or that France speaks only French.

ZIRE: an extinct language of New Caledonia

SIL code: SIH

Region: Bourail, coastal plain.

Alternate names: ZIRA, SIRHE, SICHE, SÎSHËË, NERË

Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Central-Eastern Oceanic, Remote Oceanic, New Caledonian, Southern, South, Zire-Tiri.

Comments: Zire is reported to be extinct. No mother tongue speakers. There are apparently a few who learned it as second language. Grammar. Extinct.

And, by the way, you need to check some numbers [sustance.com] before saying there's less Catalan speakers worldwide than German speakers in Paraguay. That's plain stupid

I'm not so "stupid" as to believe numbers on
http://www.sustance.com/catalan/ , a page whose stated purpose is the promotion of Catalan. Only in tiny Andorra (population: about 67,000) is Catalan an official language, and even there, 60% of the population speaks Spanish, according to Ethnologue

A volunteer, to correct you and another responder who claimed I didn't understand the concept, is not simply someone who works for free. That's a hobbyist. "Volunteer" includes the notion of being motivated mainly by the ideal of serving the organisation to which one volunteers. Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.

Long, long, ago, I used Netscape (well, a little longer ago it was Mosaic, but I digress). IE was usually slower and dumber. Things changed. I stayed with Netscape for quite a while - until I needed Hebrew webpages. The cludgy integration of non-Latin fonts into Netscape made me want to kill it. So, I switched to IE in version four - and it was wonderful - full support for many wacky charsets (and their damned variants) I sometimes need. I used to use IE with Opera, using IE only for sites that needed it, but recently, I stopped using Opera (though it remains installed) because 6.x has been buggy on my machine.

It will probably stay that way, because the advantages mentioned with regards to Mozilla (rather, specific features - there remains the advantage of non-MS products) can be had with a couple of small addons - such as Crazy Browser and more importantly, The Proximitron which allow pretty sophisticated control over what gets displayed. For me, IE with add on adkillers is the best solution - and before you suggest that I am a unique case, keep in mind there are a lot of odd languages out there. For example, Farsi, Syriac, and of course, Arabic are not only RTL, but use contextual fonts.

I think there is a shortsightedness that MS actually avoided here. For example, I was on the Syrcom mailing list for a while. Microsoft worked with the list's moderator and other interested developers to make ISO adhereing contextual RTL fonts. In W2K, they would show up as an Arabic font, but in WinXP, Syriac is an independant language, with the user developed fonts available on the standard release CD (at least on Pro, I dunno about Home). A quick check of Sourceforge says Ayuta for Linux (Ayuta=letter in Syriac) is in development stage 1. Huzzah.

To add support for a foriegn language in W2K/XP is both trivial and well integrated from notepad on up - instead of using Hebrew word processors, MS Word works quite nicely - and spell checks in Arabic and Hebrew. This may be another element of Microsoft's monopoly, but many monopoly's are built in areas that no one thought to care about. Multilanguage support for bilingual users is something that microsoft spent a considerable time on and it is reaping the benefits - everyone using "strange" fonts plus Latin chars is using 2K or XP. This is not altruistic on MS's part - having an OS where the only regional component is the text in the help files and GUI is handy for MS - but more so for developers, and users.

Sorry for the rant, but this has bugged me about both Netscape and Linux in the past - ultimately *functionality* weaned me off both. When I build a firewall, using Linux is a no brainer. But for anyone who might need other languages in addition to those which use the Latin set, anything but 2K/XP is kludgy, non-standard or only supports some of the standards.

I hope this is rectified at some point in the future, because it does limit one's options. And if something else, be it Mac, Linux or whatever has managed to rival this level of integration without me noticing, please let me know - without flaming - I am interested only in using a computer as best suits my needs, not to advance a platform... though maybe to advance a social platform too :-).

P.S. To the curious or confused, in simple terms, Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic primarily used for religious purposes in the various Syrian churches. Rather important for academics in Relgious Studies, Comparative Linguistics, and sometimes Classics and historical Philosophy - when Greek philosophy was banned by the Church, it was available in Arabic editions which had been translated from Syriac editions, which in turn, were done from the Greek. The old Estrangela style of font is my favorite, it looks like it came out of Star Trek or something :-).

Instead of the proposed novel yet stoopid approach of letting volunteers do the translating ("Sie sind sehr hübsch!" ---> bored kid ---> "you look like a pig!") why don't we get some experts together to once and for all design a universal META langauge. Create a dictionary for every language into the META language and from the META language into every language and voila, you can translate every language into every other language. To add a language, however obscure, you only need to add 2 translations (to and from the META language).

For n languages this reduces the need for having to have n*n dictionaries down to 2*n. (for example, to translate every of the 6500 languages mentioned on http://www.ethnologue.com/ you need only 13.000 dictionaries...instead of 42.250.000 if you do it the bablefish way)

Thanks, I just owe you my laugh of the day - went to that site and browsed around for a few secs when my eyes fell on this language: Anal.

apparently a small language in India.. :)

:Peter

:Peter

The Ethnologue language name index list the 6,800 (not a typo) langauges in use today.

Check it out.