Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 November 13

= November 13 =

Which language is first to speak or use
Which language is considered the first one to be spoken for a person to learn in his or her nation that is multilingual for the following nations: Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland and Afghanistan? Donmust90 (talk) 01:03, 13 November 2018 (UTC)Donmust90Donmust90 (talk) 01:03, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Are you seeking a separate answer for each of them, or are you saying "if one person from each country learns the same second language, which language is it most likely to be?" Nyttend (talk) 01:54, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Thinking just of Switzerland, the different languages are regional. If a child is born and raised in a French-speaking region, he or she first learns French, and later learns the other languages of Switzerland. It's not as if all the languages of Switzerland are spoken natively in every part of Switzerland. —Stephen (talk) 05:20, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Languages of Luxembourg, Languages of Belgium, Languages of Afghanistan has data to answer your question, as does Languages of Switzerland to go along with Stephen's post above. In general, you can find information to answer questions you have in this subject area by looking for the Wikipedia article titled "Languages of XXXX" where "XXXX" is the country you have a question about.  -- Jayron 32 12:10, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * If a child is born and raised in a French-speaking region, he or she first learns French [true] and later learns the other languages of Switzerland [uh ... let's say: starts to learn at least one of them]. It's not as if all the languages of Switzerland are spoken natively in every part of Switzerland [true]. Stephen's main point (I think) -- that it's mistaken to think that each area of Switzerland has two or more native languages -- is valid. The most famously bilingual part of Switzerland may be Biel/Bienne; but I believe that even there, "balanced" bilinguals (people equally competent in both languages) are rare. -- Hoary (talk) 23:12, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * And more: The article Languages of Switzerland does point out that Swiss German is not standard German, but perhaps could be clearer about this. As I understand it, the average adult Swiss speaker of German is already effectively bilingual (their particular variety of Swiss German, plus standard German); in addition to one or more among French, Italian, Romansh, English, Spanish, etc. And in places, the article gives an odd impression: in the trilingual canton of Graubünden, more than half of the population speaks German, while the rest speak Romansh or Italian; this isn't clearly wrong, but I doubt that there are more than a very few speakers of Romansch who don't also have native-level competence in one or other of German and Italian. -- Hoary (talk) 23:31, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

What language is this?
Al-Jamʻīyah al-Saʻūdiyah li-Ṭibb al-Usrah wa-al-Mujtamaʻ  and al-Jāmiʻah al-Urdunīyah, ʻImādat al-Baḥth al-ʻIlmī

What language are these, and if we can identify the language, what do they mean? They come from Ulrichsweb (they say that these are the publishers for four and for one periodical, respectively), but unfortunately I don't have any information about the publications themselves, and reverse-searching Ulrichsweb produces no results (probably it doesn't like the ʻ and - characters). It looks like Arabic, but if I copy normal Latin-transliterated Arabic into Google Translate, it gives me what it believes to be the original Arabic and attempts to provide a translation, while it's doing neither for these phrases. So I'm not sure whether there's some mistake in the original phrases, or a mistake by Google, or something else.

A search for mujtama finds results, e.g. "Harakat mujtama' as-silm" is the name of the Movement of Society for Peace, and maybe references to "Jama'at" (e.g. as in Tablighi Jamaat or Jama'at Khana), plus I wondered about some reference to Urdu in the second, but that's probably a false positive because this doesn't look like Urdu.

Thanks for your help. Nyttend (talk) 16:37, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * The definite article 'al' and the conjunction 'wa' preceding the words strongly suggests Arabic, but it's probably just a list of names. Since names are not really translatable, that may explain why google doesn't know what to do with it. - Lindert (talk) 16:47, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * They're Arabic names, but under a transcription a little different than may be usual on Wikipedia -- for example ʻ = IPA sound [ʕ] = Arabic letter ع . The spelling "-īy-" is a transcription of the nisbah suffix... AnonMoos (talk) 16:48, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

As limited as my Arabic is, I seem to make sense of these.
 * Al-Jamʻīyah al-Saʻūdiyah li-Ṭibb al-Usrah wa-al-Mujtamaʻ
 * الجمعية السعودية لطب الأسرة والمجتمع
 * "Saudi Association for Family and Community Medicine"


 * al-Jāmiʻah al-Urdunīyah, ʻImādat al-Baḥth al-ʻIlmī
 * الجامعة الأردنية، عمادة البحث العلمي
 * "University of Jordan, Dean's Office for Scientific Research"

These are my attempts for literal translations. The institutions may have different official English names. --Theurgist (talk) 22:54, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much! If I take the Arabic text you provided and run it through Google Translate, it transliterates it as well as translating it, and the results are quite similar to the original Latin text I had; between the effects of various Arabic dialects and of a machine translator, it seems that the discrepancies are quite negligible.  I'll definitely run with these translations.  Nyttend (talk) 02:38, 14 November 2018 (UTC)


 * The first one is the Saudi Society of Family and Community Medicine. The second is the Deanship of Academic Research at the University of Jordan. Adam Bishop (talk) 14:32, 14 November 2018 (UTC)