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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it took 7 years to reach this broad a recognition of the issue gives you an idea of how many actual speakers of the Scots language are reading the Scots language Wikipedia.

Or maybe they don't read it specifically because they know it's (linguistically) fraudulent, and now we know the reason why it's that way.

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The first sentence of the linked post addresses this: "The Scots language version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad. People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language"

But people were arguing that (i.e. treating Scots like a joke Wikipedia) long before this whole thing. See this discussion from 2005-6:

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collogue:Main_Page/Archive_1#...?

This is a terribly common problem with threatened languages. The vast, vast majority of Scots speakers also have native English. And for the vast, vast majority of topics, the English wiki article is going to be much more informative. Of course this becomes circular and self-reinforcing.

The really terrifying thought is of someone trying to preserve these languages - or in the future, studying dead languages - and finding this as the most accessible corpus. Imagine if the Rosetta Stone was merely an artists impression of dead languages.

I don't know Scots and how it is "officially" defined but when I look at the Bavarian Wikipedia https://bar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoamseitn (and I know this is a dialect and not a proper language, despite actual grammatical differences) I can't stand it. I'm a native speaker but the regional differences between the several parts of Bavaria and Austria just make the phonetic spelling totally weird. Different parts use completely different vocals in the same word, so I'm not even sure why this would be in the same language wikipedia.

> this is a dialect and not a proper language

This is a scientifically meaningless claim. There's no real distinction between a "dialect" and a "language".

There is an old linguistics joke:

Q: What is the difference between a language and a dialect?

A: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Well ok, but you're both strengthening my point and not weakening it. I do think though that languages usually are somehow formalized and that's where you can say "it's written like this even though dialect speakers pronounce it differently", whereas the language wikipedia I quoted has some "somewhat accepted by some percentage" version of how it's pronounced which doesn't even apply to 50% of the people speaking it.

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