Talk:Tibetan language

Should this be an article in its own right? Or perhaps redirect to Standard Tibetan?

Right now, there are a lot of links to this page. I believe nearly all of them have Standard Tibetan in mind, if for no reason other than that's probably what someone would mean by talking about what a given term means "in Tibetan". So maybe this should redirect.

On the other hand, it may be better to make this page an article in its own right, with a hatnote linking to Tibetic languages. That would follow the model of English language, and even Chinese language is an article despite the dialects being broad enough to possibly constitute a family. Does anyone who actually knows about Tibetan language(s) care to make such a article? (I assume it could be essentially the same as the Standard Tibetan article much as the English language article is in a sense just about modern English.) ± Lenoxus (" *** ") 19:17, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

There was a discussion about this at Talk:Standard Tibetan#the article Tibetan language, although it appears to have stalled. The tricky thing with Tibetan is that "in Tibetan" probably means one thing if one is talking about speech and something else if one is talking about writing. I don't think the comparison to English is valid, because Tibetic varieties are much more diverse than English. Tibetan is more comparable to the Germanic languages. Chinese is a good analogy, but we simply have a lot more material about Chinese. Another major difference is that the idea of a standard spoken Chinese (as well as a modern vernacular written standard) is much more well established than in Tibetan. The idea of "standard spoken Tibetan" is still a controversial and exists more in theory than in practice, and written Tibetan is still basically using the classical language.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 22:45, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thanks. ± Lenoxus (" *** ") 00:13, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Of course it should link to Standard Tibetan if that's what the default Tibetan "bo" language code is being used for, what most of the incoming links are trying to hit, and what most of the readers are trying to find (WP:USEENGLISH WP:COMMONNAME WP:PRIMARYTOPIC). The lead of that article should clean up the issues Mr Panda mentions. — LlywelynII 15:37, 14 September 2024 (UTC)