Wikifunctions talk:Human languages

proposal

this page could act as a wikiproject for natlangs -- tracking morphology function milestones, thus freeing up room at WF:catalogue and WF:suggest a function. Arlo Barnes (talk) 23:15, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

A question about the purpose of this page was asked here https://t.me/Wikifunctions/21415 GrounderUK (talk) 15:28, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Basically, what is it for? It has almost nothing except a manually written list of languages. If it has a specific purpose, it should be described at the top. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:37, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

The original purpose I had in mind was to make a dedicated space for discussion of morphology functions, which is now better served by WF:NLG SIG (if this pagename should become a redirect there I wouldn't oppose it). It might still be useful for those interested in particular languages to coordinate, but it seems most people prefer off-wiki methods like Jitsi or Telegram. Arlo Barnes (talk) 11:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

listeria

Could we use ListeriaBot and Wikidata to list the languages ? A template could do the rendering. TomT0m (talk) 11:35, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Works for me, although I'd request that someone other than me write the SPARQL to give to the bot; when I've tried before the bot kept giving me a blank output, so I must be doing something wrong. Arlo Barnes (talk) 16:06, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

@TomT0m and Arlo Barnes: we could use Listeria to list the languages (with this SPARQL query for instance: https://w.wiki/9ELv). But I see 2 main problems with that:

• Listeria wouldn't list the functions, nor it would allow to add functions to the generated list.
• the data on Wikidata are a bit messy and not complete, not sure we could reproduce the hierarchy of the current page.

So I guess it depends on what we want to do with this list... (since most languages don't have a function right now, we may not need the full tree of human languages yet ; maybe we need to be practical first).

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 07:27, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Mostly the reason I thought to do hierarchical was so that languages with similar morphologies might end up adjacent (for example, the Celtic languages with their mutation rules). But since a practical listing approach would suggest use of subpages, it probably doesn't matter too much what the root page looks like. Arlo Barnes (talk) 09:17, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, hierarchy would be good (hence why Listeria maybe wouldn't be a good fit). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 12:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

zed numbers

Maybe link to an available Z60 (nearly 1,000)?Special:ListObjectsByType/Z60 Maybe categorise each (relevant) Z60’s Talk page? Maybe categorise the Z60 Talk page Categories…? Maybe link to the Z60s and/or Categories in the Catalogue and Suggest pages? GrounderUK (talk) 12:33, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Interesting idea. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 12:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I sketched an idea based on the zed-numbers at WF:HL#Semitic and WF:HL#Artificial_and_constructed_languages, using user:Arlo Barnes/sandbox to see them in numerical order. The idea is that the subpages can either redirect to the talk page of a language's zee-number, or themselves be a place to coordinate work on functions related to that language (or language-script combo, as we see for some of them). Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:53, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

I am not sure how much coordination work will happen at the talk pages of the Z-Objects related to a language. If it is announced at at the main page or a sub page I think I would find it. I hope there will be WikiProjects for specific languages. Big pages could cause longer loading times when having low bandwidth available. What do you think about talking to same smaller language user groups in Metawiki and inviting them to start a WikiProject for their language to collect morphological functions. Hogü-456 (talk) 21:10, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Hmm… Going back to the original response that this hangs under (mine), categorizing Z60 talk pages is just a workaround because we can’t categorize the main page. If I understand @Arlo Barnes correctly, any actual discussion would take place at some level in the hierarchy that the redirects point to. That’s not something I object to but perhaps lower level talk pages could be transcluded at a higher level. It works tolerably well if there is no need for archiving (obviously, low-bandwidth users could avoid these larger pages by interacting at the lower level. On your closing point, I’m all in favour, now that we have Natural numbers with which to specify the length of strings and so forth. GrounderUK (talk) 22:27, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, ZObject pages can't take categories, but all the talk pages can (see this example). Arlo Barnes (talk) 00:41, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

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Updating the list

This page is quite incomplete as it misses many languages and contains empty sections. I have drafted in my userspace a proposed update to the page, containing languages which have their own category in Category:Natural languages. Since hundreds of languages have their own ZIDs, they either need all adding to the list, or possibly ones which functions and pages exist for to save space. Xeroctic (talk) 16:19, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

I support overwriting the current status of the page with the contents of your draft. Arlo Barnes (talk) 01:56, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

I have edited my list further to add what I think is all languages that have a page dedicated to them in project space (it currently excludes languages that do not), as well links to subpages which a few languages do. Additionally, I stated at the top of my draft that it may categorise languages differently than the current page (I used English Wiktionary's category tree, with a few categories excluded if there is no need to distinguish). Xeroctic (talk) 14:08, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

From my point of view it is important to include the language codes at the page. It makes specific languages easier to find through the search function. I like WikiProjects. With this I mean specific pages around a topic like a language where people who share the interest can discuss and help each other through answering questions. If I am interested in participating in the work at a specific topic I usually search for the WikiProject. At the moment some WikiProjects exist. Hogü-456 (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

I recently added the main language codes to this page. Additionally, although I did it before adding codes, I moved Pig Latin from constructed to a sub-language of English, because the language code treats it as such. Xeroctic (talk) 08:33, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

With the addition of Rohingya, I think my draft is finished for now. Xeroctic (talk) 19:30, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

There is now discussion at User talk:Xeroctic/Human languages about incorporating my draft into this page. Xeroctic (talk) 15:29, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

WikiProject titles

There was discussion earlier (pinging @Hogü-456) about treating subpages dedicated to each language as WikiProjects. However, there is a language project, Tunisian Arabic, which is not a subpage of this (I have added it to my human languages draft despite the lack of functions created). I created a redirect for consistency with other language pages.

Should language subpages be moved to titles of the form "Wikifunctions:WikiProject X", or something similar, keeping their subpage redirects and other shortcuts? (a likely exception is that Pig Latin may be a subpage of WikiProject English, which does not exist yet) Xeroctic (talk) 09:51, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

I guess there's a distinction to be made between:

• a page meant to engage editors at the various wikis for a given language (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc.), perhaps for the purpose of encouraging community steering with regards to WF:abstract content, and
• a page meant to collect functions relating to natural language processing for that language.

I think the wikiproject format (people sign up as participants so they can receive pings) is more useful for the former than the latter, but I could see it for either. Otherwise I think a subpage format is useful so that there is an obvious 'root' page (for language functions not confined to use with a particular language). Arlo Barnes (talk) 22:16, 5 October 2025 (UTC)