Which languages should be removed by Viki?

I totally forgot about that incident but now you mention it I remember there was some discussion about lolspeak back then.

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I wasn’t clear. Lolspeak has never been removed. It was some other artificial language which was removed. I think they also list Klingon which is the language Superman’s parent’s spoke! For a long while viki wouldn’t allow us to write Korean captions so we routinely used the lolspeak subeditor to add Korean captions.

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I recall when there was an incident with Alemannic several people used it either just to fill in whatever others would simply copy and paste German subtitles.
Alemannic is a dialect spoken most in the southern part of Germany Baden-WĂŒrttemberg, but there are many related dialects in the close regions in France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, even Italy, maybe I forgot something, so if you are interested, you know there are sources out there 

I think this “language” was taken of since there was not one real contribution to it, but I am not sure at all.

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Yes I remember that too. It was really kind of a thing back then that you where like can’t you choose an other language and join that team?! Kind of like Serbo-Croatian now.

Looking at the list I see we have Low Saxon listed too. Why would a Dutch or German person from the northern region choose that option instead of Dutch or German?

May I present you 
 our Low Saxon team!

Two Subbers, fluent in Gronings:

Our DrĂšents subber:

We also have a few subbers, who are fluent in Achterhooks:

Our Oldenburgish subber:

And our moderators, eager to edit all the subs into proper Tweants:

Anyone seeing a problem here? :thinking::rofl:

:rofl:

Ok then there are subbers for it but who will watch it in Low Saxon and not just Dutch or German. I know that most Dutch subbers on Viki rarely watch Kdrama with Dutch subs themselves, they sub it for people who are bad in English or they can watch it with their whole family. I don’t know about the Germanside though


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I suppose we could categorize the viewers roughly into 3 groups:

  1. Language activists, worried about languages dying out.

  2. People who have any of the Low Saxon dialects as their mothertongue and think and dream in their language. Yes, they still exist.

  3. Curious people. Wouldn’t you take a look if you discovered one of the K-dramas now had Low Saxon subs?

Btw, I just found an interesting article about the (alleged) difference between language and dialect (in Dutch):

There’s still the question though whether the Low Saxon speakers in The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, the US and Canada all understand each other perfectly 
 :thinking:

Btw, I don’t think checking whether the Low Saxon subbers are sincere subbers or abusers would be a big problem.

And another article, about the official status of Low Saxon in The Netherlands:

Where you only posting the videos for fun? Or am I slow on the uptake? Anyway 


I don’t know about others but Yared Dibaba is famous in Germany for speaking Low German, not Low Saxon.

How would they know, even if such subtitles were available?

I guess it is like many other “mother tongue”, there are not that many of the younger nation using it. The generation before them, mine, uses it but doesn’t write it and even the generation before mine was only using it in daily life, but never wrote in it. There are only the die hard fans of the dialect, who will perform, write songs or books in the dialect, but those are a few and although I understand most of it, I am not a master in my own dialect Palatine.

We recently were talking about Pennsylvania Dutch, who has its roots in the Palatine dialect, but there are 400 years of development in both dialects. So a Pen.-Dutch speaker and a Palatine speaker might get along to have a little conversation, but some things will need further questioning to understand the other. And so is it in my region, if you only drive 30 minutes into another direction, the dialect has small changes already, another 30 minutes drive even the tonal layers will change.

The initial thought of (old) viikii was to give even endangered languages the chance to “stay alive”.

I would say that for most of them it is the same.

I am from southwest Germany, so no, not really, I just do not understand it too well.

According to Wikipedia Low German and Low Saxon are the same thing:

I found Yared Dibaba fled from Ethiopia to Oldenburg and learned to speak the local dialect. And Oldenburgish was somewhere in the list of Low Saxon/Low German dialects 

Obviously I’m more familiar with the Dutch dialects, but I wanted to include a German one as well.

And no, not just for fun. My point was also that “Low Saxon” is an extremely broad concept. There is no standardized version, so every subber would sub into their variant of their own dialect. And then the editor would have to turn it into something cohesive 
 And viewers might not get the version of Low Saxon they’d hoped for 


It might be that we usually not using the term Low Saxon in German “niedersĂ€chsisch”. Niedersachsen is Lower Saxony a federal state in Germany. As you know dialects do not really care for borders.
But usually for the dialect in the north of Germany we would use PlattdĂŒtsch/Plattdeutsch - Low German, and maybe Frisian (Nord- oder/und Ost-Friesisch) too.

Low Saxon would belong to Niedersachsen, but Plattdeutsch is used in Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, all different federal states.

Fun fact, there is the city of Hannover in Niedersachsen which likes to advertise with the slogan that the clearest (dialect free) German is spoken there.

Well there is some standard - problem lies in the varieties from region to region. Yes!

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In Dutch we call it “Nedersaksisch” and we include all the Dutch versions too, even though they obviously are not spoken in Niedersachsen. But apparently there’s been a lot of confusion about the term:

I think people, as the normal people, not the ones who are digging into regional languages/dialects, will only be able to recognize the difference of local changes in the terms, when they actually have a local connection to it.
For me it would probably be the PfĂ€lzisch for all, and under the term PfĂ€lzisch there would be: VorderpfĂ€lzisch, WestpfĂ€lzisch, SĂŒdpfĂ€lzisch.

The English version is short in comparison

But the English version explains it nicely, our dialect varies from region to region, town to town and by listening we can often tell from which town someone is.

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The Dutch version is even shorter :joy: :slight_smile:

True. My parents both used to speak the same dialect (though Dutch to the children), yet they came from different towns and each had their own version of it. My mom even thought my dad spoke in an “old-fashioned” way, lol. Yet, she moved to his town and lived there for most of her life, so she got influenced by it and later also thought her family still living in her hometown had a weird way of speaking. :rofl:
Either way, we all understood each other, even though I never learned the dialect actively.

Btw, do you have an example of how Palatine sounds?

and for Pennsylvanian Dutch

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I didn’t know it by “Low Saxon” either otherwise I would have mentioned it in the first post. Now I wonder if “Brabants” is listed too but I doubt it
LOL. Not that I will sub into that though.

Pennsylvanian Dutch sounds like a mix of German, Dutch and how we Dutch call it “Steenkolen Engels” meaning bad English, talking in English the Dutch way in a sense.

A while ago I saw a small docu on Holland, Michigan where people talked Dutch with a heavy American accent

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@mirjam_465 That IS a lot of languages! I’ve not even heard of some of the languages, which I suspect are dialects. I can’t speak for other languages, but for Chinese dialects, there are some that doesn’t have a written language to it. I don’t think that there needs to be so many languages as I’m sure there are main (national) languages in the list that people know.

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But anyway the Netherlands and Germany already have so many options, other countries might have so many options too
 Question is: Shall they all be kept on Viki?

@jobeer How many options are there listed for China? Next to the traditional, simplified and cantonese. I suspect a few others to be dialects but I want to see if I’m guessing correctly :slight_smile:

There were some I hadn’t heard of either. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dialects. Some languages are just not well-known over the world. Either way, the difference between “language” and “dialect” is more a political issue than a linguistic one.
I also noticed several artificial languages.
I had to look up “Karaoke”. It turned out to be Thai written in the Latin alphabet. Yet we also have Thai in the Thai alphabet, so why two? Then we might as well add Pinyin 


I still think it’s good that Viki is/was trying to include even minority languages.

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@dudie @mirjam_465 It’s good that Viki wants to be inclusive but I think that there’s too many. These are the Chinese dialects (below) and I’ve not even heard of some of them such as Xiang and Zhang, but I suspected they were Chinese dialects because they sound Chinese. A little research showed I was right :grinning: These dialects are of a spoken language and there is no written word (characters) for them.

Chinese dialects:
Hakka
Hmong
Min Bei
Min Dong
Xiang
Zhuang

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