Glottopedia:Multilingual

Glottopedia is intended to be a multilingual enterprise. Glottopedia articles can be written in any language that is commonly used by linguists in their scholarly writings. Links within an article should generally be to articles in the same language. At the end of each article, links to corresponding articles in other languages are given.

These links are particularly useful for linguistic terminology. Glottopedia thus serves as a multilingual dictionary allowing linguists who use several languages in their work to get a clear idea about terminological correspondences.

When article headwords in two languages have an identical spelling, a distinguisher needs to be added. For example, the English word for 'adverb' is adverb, and the Swedish word is also adverb. (Also German Adverb has an identical spelling, because the MediaWiki software does not differentiate between lower case and upper case word-initially.) For practical reasons, English is taken as the default language in such cases, and distinguishers are added only for German and Swedish. Thus, the English article headword is adverb, while the Swedish headword is adverb (sv), and the German headword is Adverb (de). (The two-letter abbreviations that serve as distinguishers are the ISO 639-1 codes.)

Comparison to Wikipedia
The Wikipedia projects are monolingual but contain inter-wiki links. This makes sense because one does not assume that Wikipedia users are multilingual and want to search across all Wikipedias. However, for Glottopedia it makes more sense to have all the languages in a single wiki. Linguists are typically multilingual, especially non-native users of English, so they may be interested in articles from different languages. Moreover, it may well make sense to have links to articles in another language, especially from a non-English article to articles in English (on the assumption that academic linguists can read English, whatever language they prefer in their everyday work).

Languages
At the present early stage of the project, Glottopedia mostly contains articles in two languages:


 * Articles in English: see Category:En
 * Articles in German: see Category:De

A few more articles in other languages exist (see Category:Article languages).

Before starting articles on a new language, please get in touch with an editor.

Project pages
Note that since Glottopedia is a single project, the project pages should have the same content in all languages. That is, they should be updated simultaneously. Since it is not practical for any one user to do this in all languages, it should be assumed that the English general pages are standard, and that the general pages in other languages are just translations of the English pages.

Other languages

 * German Glottopedia:Mehrsprachig