Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Hinglish

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Request for a new language edition: Wikipedia Hinglish

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submitted

verification

final decision

This proposal has been rejected. This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page. A committee member provided the following comment: Per LPP policy, this proposal without a valid ISO 639 code will be rejected. This is a place to propose Wikimedia projects about language, not a forum about language itself. --Sotiale (talk) 12:17, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

• The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
• The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
• The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:

What	Value	Example / Explanation

Proposal
Language code	None (SIL, Glottolog)	A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name	Hinglish	Language name in English
Language name	Hinglish	Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item	Q1499115 - item has currently the following values: English label: Hinglish native label (P1705): instance of (P31)/subclass of (P279): mixed language, English-based creole languages, language / Wikimedia language code (P424): writing system (P282): Latin script number of speakers, writers, or signers (P1098):	Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality	LTR	Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links		Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL	none.wikipedia.org	langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name	Wikipedia	"Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace		usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace		"Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads	no	Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons. If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin"). Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo		This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone	India	"Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces		For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings		Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

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Proposal

Ineligibility

First off, I am making this request for w:Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) despite the fact that it does not have, and I am not seeking for there to be, an ISO 639 code or BCP 47 code. As per the requirements, this means that this request is ineligible for consideration.

Benefits

However, I believe a Hinglish-language edition of Wikipedia could potentially be one of the most useful editions of Wikipedia. According to reports, Hinglish is spoken by about 350 million people in India., which would place it above French (274 million speakers) as the world's fifth-most spoken language by total number of speakers.

In addition to being used in a significant amount of Indian advertising and business use cases, Hinglish has started to gain recognition in certain software applications. Google Pay offers official support for it, and Microsoft Swiftkey (a smartphone keyboard app) does as well.

A benefit of a Hinglish Wikipedia would be that with an increased usage of English vocabulary, it may be more accessible to w:Urdu and w:Urdish speakers while still primarily being aimed at a Hindi/Hinglish-speaking audience (the Urdu language differs from the Hindi language only in that a significant portion of their vocabularies are different, and they are written in different alphabets.)

Concerns

One concern with having a Hinglish Wikipedia might be that it would result in several other Wikipedias being created for other hybrids of various languages with English. However, I believe Hinglish is unique among Non-English--English hybrids, because it is widely used by a large, diverse, and growing population. Other Non-English--English hybrids, such as w:Chinglish and w:Spanglish, may be spoken by significantly fewer people, or they may be more a result of grammatical or other mistakes in attempting to speak English along with minor informal usage, rather than forms of communication that are highly important for or used by large groups of people. There is also evidence that some portion of Hinglish speakers can no longer speak pure Hindi (i.e. they may not be able to understand some information on Hindi Wikipedia without a significant amount of effort), which makes a Hinglish Wikipedia potentially very useful for them.

Challenges

There would be a number of challenges to figure out with the implementation of Hinglish, and I would want to first have a lot of discussion on them before moving forward with the proposal. These would include:

• Should Hinglish be written in the Roman alphabet or the w:Devanagari (Hindi) alphabet? Or perhaps it could automatically offer readers the option to switch between the two scripts (and maybe even the w:Urdu alphabet as well)?
  • If using the Roman alphabet, there are various stylistic disagreements, usually minor, on how to spell certain words in informal writing (for example, the Hindi word हम can be spelled "ham" or "hum"). And depending on the type of romanization used, certain phonetic information may be lost, which can result in certain words being written identically or in ways that are hard for readers to figure out. (for example, w:Hunterian transliteration) is the official transliteration method of the Indian government, but it does not distinguish between the short and long versions of several vowels unless diacritics are employed.)
  • Another challenge with the Roman alphabet is that in almost all instances where Hindi/Hinglish is written in the Roman alphabet, English words and most other words/names must be spelled according to how they'd be spelled in English. (For example, the English word "computer" is a common Hinglish word, and in the Hindi alphabet this word is written as कंप्यूटर, which would be transliterated back to the Roman alphabet as something like "kampyootar". However, in almost all instances, romanized Hinglish writers spell the word as "computer".) Some Hinglish speakers therefore might find it easier to use the Hindi alphabet if they are only familiar with the Hindi pronunciation of a foreign word/name and not its spelling.
  • (If using the Roman alphabet for a Hinglish Wikipedia, a great source of inspiration would be the Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, which is written entirely in Roman script.)
  • If using the Hindi alphabet, some w:Urdu speakers who are familiar with spoken Hindi will be unable to engage with Hinglish, because they may know the Urdu and Roman alphabets but not the Hindi alphabet. Also, English speakers will not have the benefit of being able to quickly identify certain names or English words written in Hinglish.
• How much Hindi and how much English should be used in Hinglish? (i.e. should it be 70/30 Hindi/English, or some other ratio?)
  • The amount of English used obviously has to be significantly higher than in the Hindi Wikipedia.

Miscellaneous

Finally, maybe "hg" could be used as the language code for Hinglish on Wikipedia, since this is the code used by Microsoft Swiftkey.

--GreekApple123 (talk) 16:06, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

• Oppose, not a real, standardized language. Get an ISO language code for starters. Max Semenik (talk) 13:03, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose Per LPP§3: The language must be sufficiently unique that it could not coexist on a more general wiki. In most cases, this excludes regional dialects and different written forms of the same language. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 23:24, 16 October 2022 (UTC)