Talk:Sentinelese language

endangered?

How is the language endangered? All of it's speakers live in an isolated island and have no verbal contact with people from outside the island, therefore 100% of the Sentinelese people speak only Sentinelese language. 77.126.31.137 (talk) 18:36, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

No matter how stable a speech community is, it is endangered when the number of speakers is as small as this. When the tsunami of 2004 hit, there was great fear that the entire population of Little Sentinel Island might have been wiped out. Like any biological population that is small and geographically restricted, a single disaster could wipe it out. That makes it endangered. --Taivo (talk) 20:34, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

As an additional note, many reliable sources on endangered languages include Sentinelese. It's not about "what makes sense", but about what reliable sources say on the matter. --Taivo (talk) 20:38, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

What about being "one of the world's rarest languages"? Most language communities in California would be ecstatic to have 250 speakers! — kwami (talk) 20:50, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

That would probably work, but we just can't ignore all the sources that mark it as "endangered". Something needs to be said whether "rare" or "endangered". --Taivo (talk) 21:42, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Just read what you wrote and that works fine. --Taivo (talk) 21:43, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

(unindenting) How is the language endangered? ... 100% of the Sentinelese people speak only Sentinelese language, said 77.126.31.137, 18:36, 10 September 2010 (UTC).

Rarely heard such nonsense. By the same logic, no language would ever be in danger as long as a single living speaker (100% of all speakers) remains. Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 23:23, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

There are fewer than 200 speakers living on a single island in the Indian Ocean. A single good-sized tsunami and/or earthquake could wipe out the population and it would be gone forever. That's "endangered" in a linguistic sense. --Taivo (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Absolutely. That's why the statement my post referred to is so weird. However, I hadn't seen how old it was, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to reply in the first place. Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 11:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Sometimes our dragons die of old age. --Taivo (talk) 13:43, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not nonsense, nor is it a tautology or logical fallacy, it is a quite logical point, in fact; when 100% of an isolated and coherent ethnic group (which doesn't consist of a single speaker, but dozens or even hundreds of people) are monolingual in a language, it is not threatened by language shift in the foreseeable future. The comment just assumed the continuing existence of the ethnic group as given and missed the fact that language shift is not the only threat to a language, and that (as already pointed out) physical extinction, whether through a natural disaster, disease or a military attack, or (an additional possibility) the eradication of its sources of subsistence, possibly through environmental changes that the ethnic group cannot adapt to (the small genetic pool, leading to inbreeding, as well as cultural pool, does not seem to be a direct problem, but indirectly presumably yes, by possibly hampering or completely preventing adaptation when the environment changes, although if the adaptation is genetic, and does happen to arise, it could conceivably spread relatively fast thanks to the small size of the population, even if still not as fast as cultural adaptation can be), is a quite real threat as well. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:26, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but this is an ancient discussion (in Wikipedia time). What is your point? --Taivo (talk) 15:11, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Read the beginning sentence of my paragraph again. Actually, I have to disagree and to defend the IP user even more decidedly: the UNESCO criteria say nothing about threats to the physical existence of the speakers. Sentinelese is in excellent condition according to the criteria listed, which indeed only address only the issue of generational transmission, which does not seem to be an issue in this case. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:42, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

We don't follow "UNESCO criteria" in Wikipedia, we follow general linguistic criteria, which marks Sentinelese as endangered because of the small size of its speech community. That is standard linguistic usage--size matters, no matter whether the community is stable or shrinking. --Taivo (talk) 19:11, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Funny, you had just reverted my edit in the very moment as I tried to do the same. I accept defeat, but only because of the sources cited in the article. I guess it's a case comparable to Pirahã, which isn't in immediate danger of extinction, either, thanks to the stable speech community, but which we still list as endangered. Size does not necessarily matter, either, however. When a language still has hundreds of thousands of speakers (which is a gargantuan number in this context), but hardly any under 60, it is still considered endangered. Breton anyone? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:21, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's hardly "defeat", but just fine tuning issues :) Usually linguists look at two issues: 1) size of speech community and 2) age of speech community. If 1) gets the "endangered" label, then we don't look at 2). 2) is reserved for situations such as Breton. --Taivo (talk) 20:04, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Merge proposal

User:FreeKnowledgeCreator has expressed opposition to User:Kwamikagami's proposed merge. I also think the article is fine on its own; there's no need to merge it. —Mr. Granger (talk · contribs) 00:42, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

He said he wasn't voting one way or the other. — kwami (talk) 01:54, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

I see "I object." in this edit summary. Am I misunderstanding something? —Mr. Granger (talk · contribs) 02:09, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Also think the article is fine on its own. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:46, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

What I said in the AfD was, "I'm not yet voting either way". Note the "yet" part. That was simply an initial comment - I had not made up my mind whether to vote keep at that stage. If you look, you will see that I did eventually vote to keep the article. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 04:57, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

It's been over two weeks since the merge was proposed, and I think there's clear consensus against merging. I'm going to remove the merge template from the page. —Mr. Granger (talk · contribs) 15:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Sources

(Moving here because the formatting of the older section below conflicts with it)

To address the concerns of a particular editor: The Economic Times of India is a major news outlet in that country. They are a reliable source of information for something like basic information about the history of contacts made with the Sentinelese people. Especially as the islands are part of the territory of the Republic of India. Persistently removing this source suggests either ignorance of the subject, or possibly prejudice? Please stop doing that. 172.97.137.237 (talk) 05:36, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Again, it's not a scholarly source and not useable for this article. It has been removed for the same reason from the main article Sentinelese by a different editor before I removed it here. You need to take up your beef with the other editor, not with me. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:00, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a science journal, and even in a scientific paper, this source would be more than adequate for the background information it presents. It does not matter what the decision was at the other page (although I would be interested to review it also). On this article, there are at least two editors who support including it, and you are the only one who does not. I am reverting you. This is your 3rd revert. If the matter really bothers you, then let's start an RFC? Or why don't you try finding additional sources? Either way, your actions do not reflect the existing consensus on this article, so please stop now. 172.97.207.7 (talk) 19:53, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Invalid references

The article contains this paragraph:

On the two documented occasions when Onge-speaking individuals were taken to North Sentinel Island in order to attempt communication, they were unable to recognise any of the language spoken by the inhabitants in the brief and hostile exchanges that resulted.

The two cited references do not say anything about people being taken to the island to attempt communication. They treat of an incident in about 2006 in which two fishers landed on the island and were killed by natives. Michael Hardy (talk) 11:53, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

References

"Presumed to be Ongan"

Presumed on what basis? Merely the similarity in material culture? By that argument, Basque can be presumed to be a Romance language, and Finnish a Nordic language. Yes, culturally related peoples often have related languages, but just as often they don't. The fact remains that what little original research has been done about this language involved confronting Sentinelese with Onge and Jarawa, only to conclude that they could not understand each other. At present, the only correct answer as to its affiliation is "unknown". Shouldn't we put just that in the table? Steinbach (talk) 14:10, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

That has already been changed to "unclassified". Sentinelese is basically unclassifiable in the first place. As a side note, I am not a linguist, but I assume the Sentinelese language is a language isolate. It is known to be mutually unintelligible with the Ongan languages, so I am not sure who assumes it is Ongan... --2A02:AB04:2AB:700:D0FA:CB15:1179:C411 (talk) 08:59, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Steinbach: Well, English is demonstrably related to Albanian, but I bet if someone was yelling threateningly at you in Albanian from several hundred feet away, you wouldn't be able to make out much of what they meant. That would have been the situation that the Onge speaker who was brought to North Sentinel Island found himself in, presuming linguistic relation.

Of course, we simply don't have enough evidence to classify the Sentinelese language; it could very well be a language isolate, but if it were not, it would be Ongan by Occam's Razor. --Corsican Warrah (talk to me) 14:59, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Potential Sentinelese wordlist

I've seen claims that there is a wordlist for the Sentinelese language. It was supposedly compiled by Dr. M. Sreenathan, a linguistics professor at Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University, which is a university in India -- i can't verify if this wordlist exists, as it's found in a book (https://www.amazon.com/Languages-Andaman-Nicobar-Islands/dp/9390122309) and i cannot buy said book to see if this wordlist exists.

I'm not familiar with wikipedia (this is actually my first time on this site, with an account, in general) so should this be added to the main article? [1]https://twitter.com/adam_farris1/status/1664242843194638336 Dsjsdiojiaosdjasijoasdjsaodjosa (talk) 23:40, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Phonology

There's quite a few audible bits in this video so I suppose we could say at least something about its phonology? And perhaps include phonetic transcriptions of the few snippets of speech that have been heard in the contact videos (obviously with the note that their meaning is unknown). --Corsican Warrah (talk to me) 09:30, 23 March 2024 (UTC)