RE: [geolang-comment] what is a language

["Bandholtz, Thomas" <Thomas.Bandholtz@koeln.sema.slb.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
...
> That sounds just about right to me.  Where is the relaxed definition?

Good question! They apparently don't care. At least I could not find any
explicit definition around. The activity has been raised by UNESCO
http://firewall.unesco.org/culture/heritage/intangible/languages/html_eng/in
dex_en.htm

There is a discussion of criteria for endangeredness rather than of what a
language would be
http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/ell_home.html
http://www.terralingua.org/FAQs.html

Even "Mapping between ISO 639 Language Codes and the Languages Identified in
the Ethnologue"
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/

oops now I found something:
"What is a language? The term has been used in many different senses.
Popular usage often reserves the term 'language' for the major, prestigious
speech forms of the world, and uses 'dialect' for everything else. Some
people use 'language' to refer to speech forms that share a certain
percentage of similar vocabulary, and 'dialect' to refer to speech forms
that share higher percentages. Or they may consider varieties to constitute
the same language which have similar grammatical and phonological systems.
Many people, including some linguists, use the terms 'language' and
'dialect' without always clarifying the sense in which they are being used.

To those of us who are interested in cross-cultural communication and
developing usable literature for speakers of many languages, however, it
seems clear that one of the main factors that must be considered in
distinguishing 'language' from 'dialect' is how well two linguistically
close speech communities understand each other. Marginal intelligibility
between two language communities does not allow their speakers to engage in
meaningful communication beyond bare essentials....."
http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp

http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp is a brilliant informal PSI set
legacy!
They have URLs for each country like
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Norway
but not for each language. We should ask them to continue with
URL-per-language.

Thomas Bandholtz
Manager CM / KM 
SchlumbergerSema
http://www.schlumbergersema.com

Kaltenbornweg 3
D50679 Köln / Cologne 
Germany
+49 221 8299 264