Template talk:Infobox language family

Discussion
I propose the ISO_15924 to be added to the template. They have a nice notification system of new languages added and they use 4characters code. (talk) 26 November 2010 (UTC)) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.6.74.224 (talk)

Any reasons why not add a field number of speakers? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I expanded the number of children to 18 to account for daughters of Biu-Mandara A.5 languages. (Taivo (talk) 13:04, 28 February 2008 (UTC))

I added the children to 20 for Trans New Guinea languages. -- &#9993; Hello World! 12:47, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

ISO 639-5 is a new international standard for language families. The use of ISO 639-2 in this infobox will eventually be faded out. Besides, if no one opposes, I am going to add a link for linguistlist.org lists, which contain lists of all languages in that language family, including ancient ones. - &#9993; Hello World! 06:46, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Template:ISO 639-5 is there for storing the data. I added data for codes from aav - cai, see Template:ISO_639-5/table. So we have one central place for storing the data and maybe only need to add the ISO 639-5 code to each article. TalkChat (talk) 04:11, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Sandbox edits
Hey folks,

Can we make the text for this template the same as the text used for Infobox Language Template? 06:51, 6 August 2009 (UTC) | PK2 (talk)

Other fields
I noticed that neither the iso2 nor iso5 fields were documented at Template:Infobox language family/doc so I went ahead and added them. Please feel free to improve.

I've also noted that 6 pages so far use a "proto-name" field which is not yet supported by the template nor covered by the docs:


 * Altaic languages -> Proto-Altaic
 * Indo-European languages -> Proto-Indo-European language
 * Mayan languages -> Proto-Mayan
 * Mixe-Zoque languages -> Proto–Mixe-Zoquean
 * Oto-Manguean languages -> Proto–Oto-Manguean
 * Uralic languages -> Proto-Uralic

&mdash; Hippietrail (talk) 00:10, 20 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Added. But most are red links. — kwami (talk) 04:32, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I've botted in all the protolangs into their appropriate families except for proto-Armenian and proto-Circassian, the last only because we don't have the article. Do we want to add this option to Infobox language as well for things like Armenian? Proto-Basque I got at Vasconic, proto-Greek at Hellenic, proto-Romanian at E. Romance, and proto-Norse at N. Germanic. — kwami (talk) 05:51, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Analysis of infobox fields
Here is a breakdown of how many times each field is used in language famly infoboxes in section 0 of articles. Note there are quite a few in pages which the template does not support. There may also be a tiny amount of pollution from fields used in other infoboxes on the same page:

&mdash; Hippietrail (talk) 08:18, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * If we do this again, we should look for 'state' (singular, not supported) and for famn skipping numbers other than 1. — kwami (talk) 02:27, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Hey, none skipped! Ten infobox language articles had skipped levels, but only half were ones we'd want to display anyway. — kwami (talk) 18:04, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
 * 'Speakers', 'native speakers', 'Spoken by': deleting as I come across them. States > region (if not reduntant) and nativename > altname. Most (script, notice=Indic, etc.) seem to come from converting from Infobox language.
 * Leaving in:
 * 'lingua' in Celtic, Germanic, Romance, West Germanic,
 * 'extinct' in Shastan. This may be useful to add support for.
 * — kwami (talk) 09:56, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

There's a way of detecting any unsupported parameter, discussed here. No time to figure out how to code it right now. — kwami (talk) 06:07, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

ethnicity parameter?
Should we add an ethnicity parameter to this template, as I recently did for Infobox language? E.g., Maipurean languages should probably have a link in its info box to Arawak peoples (unless they are not congruent, in which case having to make that decision will clarify things).

However, IMO it would need to be optional, as there is seldom an ethnicity for a language family (though there often are for branches of families), and we would need to keep an eye out for people trying to spuriously add e.g. Sino-Tibetan peoples as the "ethnic group" speaking Sino-Tibetan languages. I'm not sure it would be worth the complications that would cause. — kwami (talk) 09:35, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

ref link?
So we have a convenient way of ref'ing family stubs, how about adding a field for the 5-number SIL code and link to their site? E.g. 242-16 for Edekiri languages, which are now tagged for no refs. What would we call such a field? — kwami (talk) 04:24, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

We'll need the option of multiple entries, like this for Cariban: 404-16 for a Cariban family that consists of only one language and is a branch of "North Brazil", then 387-16 for the rest of the family (I think). — kwami (talk) 02:37, 2 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Done. Should we add s.t. for LingList as well? — kwami (talk) 20:04, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

map size & infobox size
Currently our maps are manually sized, and the infobox has apparently been enlarged, leaving the maps looking rather puny. I plan on automating it unless a 'mapsize' parameter is used, in which case that will override the default. Default will be set at 350px, which fits the current infobox size; that can then be changed here to keep all articles in sync. Once the infobox is changed, the maps be screwed up until I can AWB all the transclusions, which will take a few minutes. — kwami (talk) 03:10, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Added 'boxsize' to override the default width; at Indigenous languages of the Americas, for example, the Tucanoan box should be the same width as the others. Default is 22em, as it was. IMO this should be added to other infoboxes so we can make them the same size when they are aligned in a column. (Currently boxwidth is in ems and mapwidth in px: should we use the same units?) — kwami (talk) 04:35, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

sub-children?
Sometimes i feel it would be useful to give more information about a child language category by showing what languages are part of that category, particularly if that category is a geographic category or proposed language family, for instance, the "formosan" category of Austronesian languages, it seems neater and easier to separate into formosian and malayo-polynesian, and then under the "formosan" category list the the languages that are in that group (like bullet pointed under, or maybe in a drop-down menu?). Similarly, in the formosan page, the "northern formosan languages" is a proposed grouping of three formosan languages and I think it would be neater and easier to list it alongside the other divisions of formosan and then have its 3 sub-groups listed under it. I propose the code would look something like this: |familycolor = Austronesian
 * child1     = East Formosan
 * child2     = Northwest Formosan
 * 2subchild1     = Western Plains
 * 2subchild2     = Atayalic
 * 2subchild3     = Northwest Formosan
 * child3     = Bunun
 * child4     = Tsouic
 * child5     = Rukai
 * child6     = Puyuma
 * child7     = Paiwan

Where "2subchild1" is the 1st "subchild" of the 2nd child.

This concept is somewhat acheived in the page for West germanic but It looks kinda ugly, and difficult to easily understand.

Is this kind of thing possible to implement? I don't know how these formatting things are made so I'm unsure. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ihaasa (talk • contribs) 14:16, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Reference errors
Looks like this template is newly causing referencing errors in some articles. Alta language is one example. Were recent changes made to the template that might have caused this? -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:30, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Ingain language is another article with a bad reference that used to be fine. do you think something might have gone wrong with your recent changes to cause these problems? -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:39, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Alta shows an error because it calls for e18 as the ref, but doesn't provide an ISO3 code to generate the reference with. (Add a fake ISO3 code and preview, and the error disappears.) Ingain is a problem because the automatic Glotto code refs have been disabled, evidently due to some consensus I wasn't party to. You'll need to ask at infobox language why that was disabled. (They called it a "pseudo-ref".) I don't think either has anything to do with my edits, except that Alta wouldn't have displayed the error before now, because those legacy params from infobox language (speakers, date, ref) would've been ignored. Due to my changes, an old param error is now visible. — kwami (talk) 21:05, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Because Alta is not a language or a family, and doesn't have any ISO, glotto etc. codes, I deleted the info box. We could keep it and fix it if you like, but it's redundant since we have articles for both Alta languages. — kwami (talk) 21:12, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

As for Ingain, Glottolog isn't a ref for the extinction date anyway.

There are a number of other articles that now have this problem. We might change infobox language so that it generate a glotto ref if called from the ref param. That won't help articles where it's called from the main text, though. — kwami (talk) 21:16, 5 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the fixes! Kwegu language is another problem, as is Mayo language. It seems like the documentation for the template isn't particularly good ... I wouldn't know that an ISO code is necessary to generate the reference--and I instead simply see the referencing error(s). (Oops! I guess those are both using infobox language and not infobox language family.) -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:22, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Kwegu is a problem because the ELP "pseudo-ref" was also disabled after I created it. You'll need to ask at infobox language why that was done. Mayo was because I updated the ref and didn't catch that the old one was called. — kwami (talk) 21:26, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks,, for flagging up the error with Ingain language. As far as I can see, Glottolog shouldn't be cited there in the first place, as it doesn't have any information about the date of extinction. On the general point, the removal of the automatically generated pseudo-references from the infobox was done after a discussion a few months ago. Ingain was missed in the clean-up operation because it uses glotto, an undocumented feature of the infobox. I don't see any other articles that use the same trick . – Uanfala (talk) 21:28, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Script parameter
Previewing an edit at Aramaic shows Preview warning: Page using Template:Infobox language family with unknown parameter "script". However, the documentation includes  with "The writing systems that literate speakers use for the language family". I'm hoping someone who understands what's going on will fix the article or the documentation. Johnuniq (talk) 07:32, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

"Classification" links to "Language family"--better to link to "List of language families"?
I'm wondering if it might be more helpful to by default link the auto-populated "Linguistic classification" field "title"/parameter name text to Language family, but the text of the field itself, which reads "One of the world's primary language families" should link to List of language families. This seems far more intuitive, as people who want to look at the idea of linguistic classification might be interested in learning about the idea of the idea of a language family, but people who want to see what the primary language families themselves are might prefer to see that list. Also, it removes redundancy from that field. Determinerteeth (talk) 22:06, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Italic for singular languages
In some articles, there seems to be a convention that the subdivisions ( etc.) which are single languages are in italic type, while branches with multiple languages are in roman type. See for example, Indo-European languages. Is this a commonly accepted practice? It is not explained to the reader, and not mentioned in the template documentation. It also seems difficult to implement consistently, as there is often controsversy about whether some dialect constitutes its own language. An example of this is Ugric languages, where all languages are now italicized as singular languages, while that view is challenged in the language articles Khanty language and Mansi languages.

This problem could be solved by removing the italics, with a small loss of information, since the convention is not explained to the reader. Would this be ok? Jähmefyysikko (talk) 09:28, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Ethnicity for branches
The field  is used on pages like Turkic languages, Slavic languages and Iranian languages to link the corresponding groups of peoples (Turkic peoples etc). While the links are useful for navigation, the label Ethnicity seems wrong. As repeatedly discussed on the article talk pages, these are not single ethnic groups (or more specifically ethnolinguistic groups), but linguistically motivated collections of multiple ethnicities.

Ethnicity is of course a valid label for single languages which are spoken by a well-defined ethnic group. That should not change, but would it be possible to find a better label for this field, which would be more agnostic and not refer to ethnicity, when used with language families? Jähmefyysikko (talk) 09:31, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Change proposition for Uralic languages colour
I propose changing the colour of the Uralic languages infobox, to a more pleasant lime green. With careful consideration, I suggest the #a8fe74 or #93fe52 colours, as these can't be mixed with other language families' coluors. They are still pleasant to look at, and not too different from the current #00ff00, so it wouldn't make too big of a disturbance. And also would fit better with the "lime" name better then the current one since that is more of a "neon-green" rather then "lime". Ewithu (talk) 15:44, 4 July 2024 (UTC)


 * I agree, these two are much more easier on the eye. #a8fe74 would be nice. Merrahtar (talk) 18:11, 5 July 2024 (UTC)