Wikipedia Languages

cool quiz, relessness. I think I recommended this one for the front page.

Smartypants!

Yeah, this is a fun quiz.

Please accept "Farsi" for "Persian."

And it's weird that "Mandarin" gets shown as "Chinese" when the directions specifically mention dialects.

and technically some pages on Wikipedia are written in the dialect of British English while others are not. The editors don't like to mix English dialects. But this wouldn't appear on the languages page.

One other weird thing, they've got Serbian, Croatian, *and* Serbo-Croatian. One thing this quiz teaches: Europeans from small countries or regions with obscure linguistic traditions sure do like to use Wikipedia and/or they're trying hard to preserve those obscure linguistic traditions. The results of this quiz definitely don't correlate to the number of speakers of these languages.

And, a lot of people make pages in these obscure languages just because they can. Take Esperanto for example, no one speaks it as their first language, and the vast majority of people who learn it will speak one of the languages listed above (in other words, it's wholly unnecessary to make Wikipedia pages in it), and yet, they still exist.

Yes, I realized both of those points. I was kind of implying the same things... Europeans are likely to have computers, be literate, and have a lot of free time. People who speak Amharic, not so much.

Latin is another example of a language with 0 native speakers.

idk about other languages, but i've seen dutch pages that are also available in zeeuws, nedersaksisch, frisian... different dutch dialects. i dont even know where they speak nedersaksisch...

Yes, I was surprised that Manx wasn't here. They're trying hard to revive the language in schools, so I thought there would be someone slathering it all over Wikipedia for school kids to learn from.

@evacooper: Nedersaksisch is the collective name for Gronings, Drents, Saksisch, Twents, Veluws, Achterhoeks and Stellingwerfs. It also is spoken in a large swath of Germany, from there all the way to the Polish border, but the Dutch and German dialects have separate Wikipedias.

British and American English aren't really dialects, just slightly different spellings. There are some minor differences in words, but they're mostly slang words (not used in academic writing) and often understood on both sides of the pond due to globalisation and pop culture.

Might as well have Elvish, Klingon, or Pig Latin. They're as useful to translate pages into as Welsh.

@McLerristarr: question of semantics, really. If you're going to count Moldovan and Romanian or Serbian and Croatian or Tagalog and Filipino, etc, as completely different languages... then British and American English are almost different languages.

Serbo-Croatian, Serbian and Croatian are not different languages. Simple English and English are most obviously definitely not different languages. The criteria for language difference doesn't apply there, so it would be wrong to extrapolate them to Brit/Amer.

They are dialects of the same language that they are purposefully trying to make different from one another for political reasons and out of spite. It could be completely the same as the other examples I gave, but is not presently because of political realities, not linguistic ones.

Being sensitive to the feelings of people who place the politics of discord and tribalism before reality is very low on my list of priorities.

pope knows speak latin

but speaker of native not he is what? yes

Could say the same for Hindi I suppose

Please accept "Low German" for "Low Saxon" and "Azeri" for "Azerbaijani". This is a great quiz though. Really makes one think of all the dialects which are barely spoken any more.

I tried both of those in the quiz. Only Azeri worked.

Dang, only ever read about Alemannic in German, didn't occur to me it wouldn't be the same in English. Doofus.

I also tried Allemanish, then decided it would probably not be in the top 100 when nothing appeared.

What is the difference between Anglo-Saxon and English?

Anglo-Saxon is Old English. It's closer to Latin and German than modern English in terms of grammar and to some extent vocabulary, and is incomprehensible to native English speakers.

I wouldn't say it's close to Latin - Romance and Germanic are separate branches of the Indo-European tree.

^ Only in terms of vocabulary, and in many cases not even that. Structurally they owe almost nothing to Romance. And while a lot of our technical and advanced vocabulary is derived from Romance or Greek, very little of our foundation vocabulary can say the same.

I can't believe that Quebecois didn't make the list

Il y a vraiment des pages en québécois ?

It's not counted separately, Quebecois work on the French (or the English) Wikipedia.

Nice quiz indeed. Some suggestions:

* Accept Scottish as Scots

* Accept Bangla/Bangladeshi as Bengali

I wouldn't agree with Scottish for Scots - Scottish is more usually used to denote Scottish Gaelic, I think.

Scottish is not the same as scots. Scots is a germanic language, basicly english with a dialect. And scottish is (confusingly) short for scottish gaellic and is a celtic language, not similar to english at all. More like irish (gaeilge).

This is a sentence i(n) english

Chan eil an abairt seo ann am Beurla

mind you I used a tranlslator for the gaelic one. So it might contain errors, but just wanted to show that scottish gaelic is not at all like english.

Níl an abairt seo i mBéarla. This is the same sentence in irish. See the resemblance?

hope I have taught some people something new :)

Indonesian AND Malay? They're the same language!

they have small differences, like british english and american english, but theyre pretty much the same yeah

I cannot understand why I got such aswers as Malayalam, Wu, Telugu and Kazakh and didn't got Korean, Romanian and especially Czech, as it's the language of country bordering Poland. It happens just too often to me.

Anglo Saxon and Low saxon do not count! Otherwise a brilliant quiz

How do they not count? The quiz is based on objective facts.

Doesn't Bahasa simply mean 'language'? So that would be rather redundant.

How do you define user language if I may ask? It is definitely not specified during the sign up? I use wikipedia and I use it in multiple languages (that I know), depends on the page that I visit. It doesn't look like it's based on the number of people browsing a wiki page of a particular language?

It's based on the number of people with a user account on the language. Nowadays that means that people have browsed the language while logged in.

There is a language option in settings. I have mine set to British English, so I'm not sure why that isn't a separate result on the quiz.

That's just user interface, there isn't a separate Wikipedia project in British English.

a really great quiz

some languages are odd

I beg to differ... I would say that all are !

I admit, I am shocked that Klingon is not here. Perhaps it's on its way to becoming a dead language....

Klingon Wikipedia has been closed several years ago.

Anything lower than Latin shouldn't count - it's a dead language, so they are deader than dead. - Luxembourgish? Now you're just making stuff up.

Latin is only dead as a spoken language, and some people might argue it isn't even that. It is, I think, more widely understood than Esperanto, so it probably ought to be used as a kind of "global language".

Also, Luxembourgish is hardly 'made up'. It's one of many Germanic dialects that were pushed under the rug in favour of standard languages like Dutch and High German, but which is still spoken nevertheless, and is gaining favour in the education system. I believe more people speak it in Luxembourg than French.

Thousand of people learn latin everyday, hell, thousands in just my country alone. In it us still used for several purpose. But it is not an everyday language that gets spoken anymore (some might though, just for fun)

I got Serbo-Croatian but missed Serbian and Croatian...

I speak multiple languages since i was 4.

Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbo-Croatian (and don't forget Montenegrin).

Lol @ Esperanto

Multaj Esperantistoj uzas Vikipedion.

Would be another pointless translation since all Romansh speakers know either English, German, Italian, or French... and sometimes all five.

The more written material there is for a small language, the better, because languages die out when their speakers have no place where they can use them.

and then more people will be speaking the same language and the world will be more cohesive and full of people who are better able to communicate with one another. Why's that a bad thing?

So make a dictionary and put it in a museum.

Linguistic studies prove that it's extremely difficult to understand the nuances of a language if all you have is written evidence. A corpus can only ever be incomplete.

The things you are prioritizing are spectacularly less important than the things I am.

I don't think you understand. You can hardly get anything from written evidence alone, and even less from a dictionary of all things. Linguists working solely with a limited written corpus struggle to piece together things that would be extremely easy to get if only they had a living speaker. And a dual-language dictionary is perhaps the least useful written tool for learning about a language; and a dictionary of definitions is little better, especially if it's written in a language that you now can't understand properly. The death of languages isn't without consequence for our understanding of that language, other languages, that culture, and other cultures.

Amazing that they can translate into so many languages!

i almost did too if it wasnt for your comment

xD

Good Quiz forgot Afrikaans

Yes. Precisely zero of which don't speak English fluently. Thus.... pointless.

I find this a little hard to believe. I've known many Welshmen and they all spoke English as their first language. And... at 16... he didn't have to go through British public schooling and use English there? It almost seems like they'd have to go really far out of their way to try and not use English (and I realize some do, just, didn't think it would be to such extremes). But, okay if you say so.

There are many Welsh-language schools in Wales, and the universities offer courses solely in Welsh. You could easily get by, even today, knowing only Welsh. Oh, and also, by public schooling, do you mean the state system (American public schools) or the private system (British public schools)?

The same way that you don't speak Aramaic but you can still know it's pointless to translate pages on Wikipedia into it.

There possibly are people who only speak Welsh but they are very, very rare. I feel like @kalbahamut didn't actually mean "British public schooling" (in Britain a public school and a private school are the same thing, and a school funded by the state is called a "state school"), and there are definitely state schools that speak Welsh. My cousin used to go to one. It is true to say that you really do have to go out of your way not to speak English in Wales, and quite a lot of people in Wales, if not most of them, don't speak Welsh (and obviously speak English). Also, it is important to realise that it is quite difficult to assess whether someone can speak a language in an objective way. It is possible that a 16-year-old whose English was "decidedly poor" might have, for example, been dyslexic. I'm not sure if I think it's pointless to translate these pages into Welsh. There's nothing wrong with translating a page into multiple languages people are fluent in.

Nothing wrong with it it just serves little purpose as far as I can tell. But people are free to do whatever they want. All actions have only as much meaning as we ascribe to them, no more, no less, as life is inherently meaningless anyway.

I'm still trying to understand Brandybuck's explanation of British schools. Are all British public schools private? (That makes no sense to me.) We have both public and private schools in the US, but no public private schools - or private public schools, or...I'm so confused. (I think Welsh is a cool language, by the way. At least the written language looks cool. I don't think I'd ever be able to speak it. The closest I ever came was a cousin named Llewellyn and who knows if we were even pronouncing his name correctly? We said it as, "Lew-well'-lynn")

In the UK schools funded by taxes that are run by the government are called state schools, and schools that parents pay for are called private schools. "Public school" in the UK is a term that originated before state schools existed, and I think it was supposed to be opposed to having private tutors to teach children in a specific rich family. The logic behind this is similar to how a swimming pool that anyone can use for a fee is called a public swimming pool even if it is a private business, while a swimming pool in somebody's garden is a private swimming pool. Nowadays the term "Public school" in the UK is most commonly used to refer to an old private school, so for example Eton College, Westminster School, Tonbridge School and Rugby School would all be considered Public Schools.

That seems pretty horrible. How can a school exist while not teaching the official language of the country. Sure welsh can be like an MFL or something but English should definitely be compulsory from day 1!

^ Welsh is the only language that has any official status in any part of the UK. And it can hardly be a MFL given it isn't foreign??

And of course, I guess 'Hindu' instead of 'Hindi'. *facepalm*

Funny that Slovenian ranks higher than Slovakia,Azerbaijan,Bengali,and Egyptian Arabic

We have a bit above average interest in this kind of projects (internet/technology, open source ...). IIRC for a long time Slovene was the smallest language Microsoft products were translated into

It'd be nice to clean up the answers a little bit; eg accepting "Viet" for Vietnamese and "Mongol" for Mongolian, since those are really the names of the languages.

Can you accept Yue for Cantonese and Slovene for Slovenian?

Definitely accept Slovene for Slovenian. I've never heard Yue for Cantonese, but I'm sure it should be accepted too.

Yùe (粵) is the abbreviated name for Cantonese. In Cantonese it is romanised as either jyut⁶ or yuet⁶

What tiny fraction of a percent of Wikipedia visits are from someone logging in?

It would be nice to see it with numbers of articles

Can Bahasa or Bahasa Indonesia be accepted for Indonesian? That's what the language is commonly called there.

Not really since there are two versions: bahasa indonesia and bahasa malaysia

But "Bahasa" is usually applied to Bahasa Indonesian whereas "Malay" is usually applied to Bahasa Malaysian. It seems to me like Bahasa should be accepted.

I typed 'Slovene' but it wasn't accepted. Please accept 'Slovene' for Slovenian!

Same thing happened to me.

Are people double-counted when both a language and its component dialects are listed (e.g. Serbo-Croatian in addition to Serbian, Croatian, and Macedonian)

You should accept Slovene as well.

Slovene dude! That should be accepted

Typed Bahasa Indonesia and didn't then try Indonesian, figuring that Indonesian must have been subsumed into 'Malay'. I feel like Bahasa Indonesia should really be accepted, if not just 'Malay', given that it could also refer to Malay.

Belarusian has currently been guessed 57% of the time and Belarusian (Taraškievica) 56%. I wonder how, since you get both for the price of one. Even more shocking is that Egyptian Arabic is more guessed than Arabic.

It's because you get Egyptian Arabic when typing "Arabic" but you don't get Arabic when typing "Egyptian"

I knew Malayalam but misspelled it.

I got Anglo-Saxon but not Danish... I quit lol

Wondering if Arabian could be accepted for Arabic. I know it isn't the same thing, but I'm sure a lot of people(like me) have missed it by typing "Arabian," and especially in this quiz, then trying to name Arabian dialects, such as Saudi Arabian, Egyptian Arabic etc.

I got Serbian and Croatian but didn't get Serbo-Croatian. Why are there 3 different languages that sound like they would be the same?!

Please add Plattdeutsch. They also have 47.9k articles

It is not based off of the number of articles; it is based off of the number of users. Theoretically, one user could have translated nearly 48,000 German or Dutch (or other language) pages into Low German.

May we have Serbo-Croat for Serbo-Croatian? I never heard of it with the -ian until quite recently.

72/80. Somehow missed Finnish.

Can you accept Javanese for Indonesian?

They are different languages.

Adding my support that Bahasa should count for Indonesian, as that most commonly refers to it. Malay would be in reference to Bahasa Malay

Such a frustrating thing to have guessed Sebian, Croatian and Bosnian only to find out Serbo-Croatian was also on the list- I think it doesn't make any sense and it shouldn't work this way. :P

Great quiz, but please consider (as of 2020 version):

- Accept "gallego" for galician

- Accept "traditional" for classical chinese, more widely used

- Accept "astur-leonese" for asturian

- Accept "briton" for breton (maybe?)

Also I get the need for distinct serbian and croatian, but as other people have pointed out, having to type serbo-croatian extra is just too much attention for what is an issue solely due to slavic nationalism. It should be counted if you type either of the two imho.

I got same Problem!

the word 'Breton' is precisely a reference to the fact that the original Celtic speakers in Bretagne were emigrants/refugees from Britain. It doesn't mean the same as 'Briton' does now but it's technically the same word

Argh, my mother's family is from Yugoslavia and I didn't even get Serbocroatian.

pretty ridiculous that there is Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovene, Macedonian, AND Serbo-Croatian appearing on this quiz. I wouldn't feel too bad about missing the last one, especially, even if you were yourself from Yugoslavia. Though, myself, I guessed all of those would have enough pages to make the cut right away because... of course there would be.

Agree that given the debate regarding whether Serbo-Croatian is a single language or multiple languages the answer set should include EITHER Serbo-Croatian and accept Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin as acceptable alternatives OR list Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as separate answers and give credit for all 3 if you enter Serbo-Croatian. (I guess Montenegrin didn't make the cut). I disagree regarding Slovene and Macedonian, which are broadly accepted as separate languages (with Macedonian being more closely related to Bulgarian than to Serbo-Croatian)

Ils sont ou les 50k de bretons ahaha

en bretagne

They are in the source. Venetian has 30k for example, Neapolitan 26k. Not enough to get on the quiz however.

I guess it's gonna be a while before we see any Wikipedia pages displayed in semaphore.

Morse the pity.

Serbo Croat as a type in for Serbo-croatian!?

so mad for getting serbo-croatian but not DANISH

Haha

Cool quiz

Dinka? (Thuɔŋjäŋ)

'Bahasa Indonesia' as a type in for Indonesian?