Talk:Kikai language

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Language vs. Dialect

Why is the title "Kikai language", and not "Kikai dialect"? The text of the article states that the classification is debated, but the Japanese government does not classify it as a separate language, and the main cited sources by Iwakura and Ogawa, as well as those by Shirata, Kibe, and Lawrence all refer to it as a dialect. - Boneyard90 (talk) 03:26, 2 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I just follow Ethnologue, a radical splitter in the lumper-splitter spectrum, and Glottolog, an up-to-date language catelogue. The language/dialect distinction does not matter much as long as we are free from the assumption that languages have special status that dialects don't have. They are just nodes within a phylogenetic tree. In the Ryukyuan context, the "languages" are abstract clusters that have little to do with actual speakers. But unfortunately, you can observe a persistent attempt here in Wikipedia to misrepresent them as privileged entities. --Nanshu (talk) 17:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Nanshu: There is an obvious tendency towards applying absolute taxonomic levels to language diversity. The most obivous symptoms of this are the units of lexicostatistics (if agreement is less than N%, then we have two languages, and so on), and the crazy idea of using industrial standardization codes. Some people tend to read too much into these grids, even if the reality is more complex (L-complex, dialect continua). –Austronesier (talk) 19:50, 26 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier:, thank you for the comment. BTW, do you know how UNESCO's Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edition, came to the world in 2010? It caused a great deal of confusion in Wikipedia and elsewhere because the "languages" and language names registered by UNESCO disagree with the linguistic community's consensus (or lack thereof). I have no idea why the Finnish Uralicist Tapani Salminen registered the languages of Japan, apparently without prior consultation with field/historical linguists working on them. --Nanshu (talk) 07:59, 27 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Nanshu: I just comes to my mind that we had (eh, still have) this discussion concerning the "other end" of Japan: Talk:Ainu language#Requested move 18 August 2019 (and all following sections). A classical example for the arbitrariness of taxonomic levels. Do you have an opinion on this? The majority of participants prefer the model "one language, three (or more) dialects", but not quite for the best reasons. I think we could profit from your insights there. –Austronesier (talk) 09:37, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

User:G-SANtos added a weird pararaph:[1]

As Kikai does not have recognition within Japan as a language, it is officially known as the {{nihongo|Kikai Island dialect|喜界島方言|Kikai-jima Hōgen}}.

Officially? Hey, which government organ says so? --Nanshu (talk) 17:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Shima

The text chunk ({{lang|kzg|しまゆみた}} ''Shimayumita'') was added by Kitsunelaine (talk · contribs) as a local name for the language [2]. This is obviously wrong. Shima refers to a hamlet in this context. It cannot refer to a dialect cluster, an abstract entity that has little to do with people there. --Nanshu (talk) 17:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]