Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of largest languages without official status

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. I see a consensus to Delete this particular article right now. But there is also an underlying note that an article on this subject could be justified if the terms are better defined and statistics are sourced. So this deletion shouldn't cover a similar but better article from being created. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

List of largest languages without official status[edit]

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WP:OR WP:SOAPBOX. The premise of the article seems to be that these languages should have an official status due to their sheer size, i.e. number of speakers. That is entirely an opinion. There are also no obvious WP:LISTCRIT, e.g. which languages are not "large" enough to be listed amongst the "largest"? Almost entirely WP:UNSOURCED as well, ever since creation 10 years ago. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 23:20, 29 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Language and Law. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 23:20, 29 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete original research. LibStar (talk) 23:27, 29 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete both "official status" and "language" are nebulous terms, leading this article to be excessively political. It is also categorizing things by what they are not, which I thought was discouraged (though I can't find the policy). Why is Min Chinese not listed? Is it not a language? Is it official somewhere (in a way that Wu Chinese (Shanghainese) is not)? Is it broken into sub-languages? The conception of the list makes it impossible to say. Walt Yoder (talk) 02:40, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. It's always difficult/impossible to prove a negative. Precisely because it is not written down, it is impossible to know which languages are not meant, and in which manner they are not official. The only "source" provided seems to have been WP:SYNTHed: Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms (1990), ISBN 0-8048-1654-9 — lists official languages of the countries of the world, among other information. So it listed which official languages there were around the world in 1990, and apparently any language that was not found in this book was thereby branded "without official status". Then figures of speakers were pulled from somewhere we don't know, arranged by languages-with-largest-number-of-speakers-not-mentioned-in-the-1990-book-with-an-arbitrary-threshold-for-the-word-"largest". Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:47, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 08:10, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Impossible to prove something this vague in the negative. Dronebogus (talk) 10:25, 31 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I disagree that this is WP:OR: The act of extracting and listing the gist of external material on some topic is what makes an encyclopedia. I disagree that this is WP:SOAPBOX: there is no emotive or political language. I cannot see any text that justifies the comment "The premise of the article seems to be that these languages should have an official status due to their sheer size,." Also the comment that "both "official status" and "language" are nebulous terms" is underwhelming: just because there is a grey zone between 'language' and 'dialect' does not mean that all articles that do not have the strictest definition of 'language' should be deleted because of that, surely? (For example, the PRC considers as dialects what non-Chinese linguists from the rest of the world as languages: does that mean that, say, material that calls Fujianese a language must not be cited as being nebulous? IYSWIM) However, it would be better to correct and update this page using the respected Ethnologue, which would be the goto source. I suggest just tagging the page as needing citations and possibly obsolete. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 00:38, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree that this is WP:SOAPBOX: there is no emotive or political language. I cannot see any text that justifies the comment "The premise of the article seems to be that these languages should have an official status due to their sheer size".

The title itself suggests that the absence of official status is significant. The rest of the article implies that this is a bad thing. This is most clearly expressed in the categories:

Category:Language policy

Category:Minority languages

Category:Linguistic rights

Category:Majority–minority relations

Category:Sociolinguistics lists

Category:Linguistic discrimination

Category:Largest thingsLanguages without official status

The lack of official status is linked to "linguistic rights" and "linguistic discrimination", the clearest indication that this list has been developed with the idea that certain languages should have official status in order to comply with certain "linguistic rights" and end certain "linguistic discrimination". This is further emphasised by suggesting such situations come about by languages without official status being "minority languages", and that that the majority language has set a "language policy". "Majority-minority relations" implies the minority is being "discriminated", despite their "rights". (Strangely, nobody seems to notice a potential conflict by being "largest languages without official status" on the one hand, but still being "minority languages" on the other; it is of course possible for the largest language in a country to not be the official language, see Punjabi language in Pakistan, where only Urdu and English are official at the countrywide level). Finally, not too subtly, it is suggested that this is not just bad, but a great wrong, to be included in a list of largest things. It's not just a practical cap (which the article itself suggests), but a highlight of the largest bad situations in which allegedly people of "minority languages" are being "linguistically discriminated" against, despite their alleged "linguistic rights". Obviously, this violates Wikipedia:Righting Great Wrongs.

Most of these categories have been around ever since the first version, which was split off from Minority language.

No justification for any of these categories is provided within the article itself. It is just assumed that this lack of official status all fits into this context of a violation of linguistic rights. This is why it is supposedly significant. All of this simply cannot pass WP:SOAPBOX and WP:OR. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 03:54, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. I could possibly see an article on "most widely spoken languages that are not a country's official language", although it would need to be very well-defined and properly referenced. As it stands, this article looks more like a WP:TNT case. Unless we have high quality RS going through the definitions and terminology in a coherent and consistent way, then I can't see this article surviving. Aszx5000 (talk) 00:23, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Needs WP:TNT in its current state, and I haven't found sources that would meet WP:NLIST. DFlhb (talk) 05:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.