Talk:Names of Wikimedia languages/nds

nds, nds-nl, nds-de

Names for nds, nds-nl and nds-de are very ambiguous: nds is the code for the dialect continuum in the North-Eastern part of the Netherlands, the Northern part of Germany (or even Denmark). The Dutch speakers of Low German use the word Nedersaksies to refer to the Dutch variants of Low German (nds-nl), but this word is also sometimes used for the complete continuum. The words Nederduuts, Leegduuts refer to the complete continuum, but in older definitions also refer to nds+franconian variants. Then, the word Plattdüütsch is used by German speakers to refer to the complete continuum, or only the variants in Germany. The word Neddersass'sch is used in Germany to refer to Western Low German, including parts of Germany. The word Nedderdüütsch is used in Germany to refer to the cmoplete continuum. To make it even more confusing: for reasons of orthography, there is a wikipedia for the Dutch variants of nds (nds-nl), but the German variants are in nds.wikipedia, which only uses the German varieties. This sometimes gives some confusion, leading people to think that nds code is only used in Germany. For reasons of consistency, the nds-wikipedia should better be called nds-de-wikipedia, but for historical reasons, this is not the case. For Wiktionary, the German and Dutch variaties share the wiktionary, so there the Dutch variants are present in nds.wikt. On the nds wiktionary, there has been a vote on how to name the variants in the entry headers, and the outcome was to call the macro nds-language Nedderdüütsch, the entries in Dutch variants Nedersaksies, and the entries in the German variants Plattdüütsch. Obviously, like explained above, the entries for these words should reflect the ambiguities, but it is not practical to explain in every entry, so that is the reason why these names were agreed upon. The German wiktionary also refers to nds as Niederdeutsch after a vote. Droadnaegel (talk) 16:59, 18 May 2015 (UTC)