Subject: [Ietf-languages] Registration request for subtag -urban

From: Christoph Päper <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:40:35 +0200 (CEST)

LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM

1. Name of requester: Christoph Päper
2. E-mail address of requester:  [email-masked]
3. Record Requested:

   Type: variant
   Subtag: urban
   Prefix: de
   Description: Kiezdeutsch
   Description: Kanaksprak
   Prefix: en
   Description: Urbanese
   Comments: Applicable to many major languages.

4. Intended meaning of the subtag: Urban sociolect, mostly spoken among younger
demographics and migrant groups; not bound to a single geographical region,
written almost exclusively in informal discourse and usually in the Latin
script.
5. Reference to published description of the language (book or article): Heike
Wiese (2012): Kiezdeutsch.
http://www.bpb.de/apuz/32957/kiezdeutsch-ein-neuer-dialekt
6. Any other relevant information: 

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Since the proposed subtag may be useful for many languages besides German and
English, it would be okay for me to drop the Prefix and Description fields:

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LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM

1. Name of requester: Christoph Päper
2. E-mail address of requester:  [email-masked]
3. Record Requested:

   Type: variant
   Subtag: urban
   Comments: Applicable to many major languages.

4. Intended meaning of the subtag: Urban sociolect, mostly spoken among younger
demographics and migrant groups; not bound to a single geographical region,
written almost exclusively in informal discourse.
5. Reference to published description of the language (book or article): 
6. Any other relevant information:

---

From: Hugh Paterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:03:15 -0700

Christoph,

What a thought provoking idea. What is your imagined (or very real) use
case? How does tagging this data help you in data processing?

Not saying that I can't imagine a use case where this tag is useful (such
as in an urban/slang dictionary), or in language data collected by
linguistic researchers (for instance see this article on Sheng, an urban
sociolect in Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_slang and also the
academic work by Mokaya Bosire on Sheng: 2006. Hybrid languages: The case
of Sheng. Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African
Linguistics, ed. Olaoba F. Arasanyin and Michael A. Pemberton, 185-193.
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.).

However, what other tags will contrast with this tag? (such as is there
also a '-rural' tag) are there other more helpful ways to delineate encoded
sociolect speech? and should those other ways also be given their own tags
in addition to '-urban'? By suggesting such a tag are we opening the door
for other use cases perhaps like '-religious' where the language/speech of
sacred ceremonies is tagged? (I'm not saying there shouldn't be these tags,
only asking by what criteria should we be evaluating the necessity or the
interrelationship of these sociolect tags?)

At what point does a sociolect (in this case urbanese) become a distinct
language with an ISO 639-3 tag, and at what point should the "urbanese"
data stop being tagged as '-urban' and start being tagged with presumably a
newer full ISO 639-3 language tag?

As is the case with urban speech it often changes very rapidly over time
when compared to standardized national languages. This means that
"urbanese" (or "vernacular" as some linguists might call it) from 1965 in
New York City might not sound the same or have the same content lexically
as "urbanese" in New York City in 2017. What sort of way is imagined to
make the distinction between epochs of language use? (Some language data
does contain tags for encoding orthographical norms i.e. German de-DE-1901
as apposed to German de-DE, but in this case by tagging something "-urban"
it could lead to the assumption that the data is directly comparable with
other '-urban' tagged data.) I mean, en-US-urban-1965-NYC would need to be
different from en-US-urban-2017-NYC or en-US-urban-2017-SFO (San
Francisco.)  I imagine that a BCP 47 tag could be applied to language data
in oral mediums just as much as written mediums. Not to say that there are
not written mediums where there is significant deviation from written
norms, for instance Leet sp3k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet. Some
studies of leet suggest that it is more than just an orthographic variation
from the societal norm and becomes a sociolect.

Another case might be romanized Arabic (sometimes called Arabizi). One case
that comes to mind is use by Jordanian university students in text
messages: Al-Khatib, Mahmoud A. and Enaq H. Sabbah. 2008. Language Choice
in Mobile Text Messages among Jordanian University Students. SKY Journal of
Linguistics 2137-65.

Food for thought,
All the best,
- Hugh Paterson III

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 5:40 AM, Christoph Päper <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> Heike
> Wiese (2012): Kiezdeutsch .
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
>

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From: Michael Everson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 23:59:40 +0100

This won’t fly. It’s not even as well-defined as Spanglish. It’s a codified learner-dialect, which ok, gets you pidgin, but pidgin isn’t stable and codifiable until it becomes creole, and then it doesn’t become taggable till it gets a literature, written or oral. 

That’s my decision. And I did read the entire proposal reference by Wiese. It’s fascinating stuff. It’s not for this registry.

Michael Everson

PS. Translate a 27,000 word novel like Alice into it, and then it would be real enough to consider codified. That’s one of my litmus tests: a reason to tae the data seriously. I’m not sure Boontling would pass that one, though I think it might still pass some others. 

> On 18 Apr 2017, at 13:40, Christoph Päper <[email-masked]> wrote:
>