Talk:Palembang language

Language??

It is more probably a dialect rather than a language - but seeing there are no real refs available - unless some turn up this is a problematic article - however much it might be embellished to look a valid subject SatuSuro 04:59, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

ethnologue.com categorises Musi as a language. Musi is no more a dialect of Malay than for instance French is a dialect of Italian. Humboldt 21:26, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

Not Malay

This article has unduly been renamed "Palembang Malay", a name nobody uses. The Indonesian Wikipedia article calls Musi "Bahasa Palembang". Humboldt 21:26, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 11 June 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) ~SS49~ {talk} 12:40, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

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Musi language → Palembang language – Per WP:COMMONNAME. "Musi language", while used as a reference name in Ethnologue and Glottolog, is not the most commonly used name among the speakers of the language itself. "Palembang" is listed as a synonym for Musi in Ethnologue, and I believe this alternative name fits better. Masjawad99^💬 02:38, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Additional comment: The terms "Palembang" and "Palembang Malay" (Melayu Palembang) are also commonly used in the literature, the most recent example being Alsamadani & Taibah (2019). Both are far from being names that "nobody uses". While these names can be understood as referring to the urban dialect of Palembang specifically (as opposed to Musi dialect proper), they are most often used to refer to the Malayic varieties of downstream Musi in general. The term "Palembang" itself historically referred to a larger geographical territory than the current definition of it as a city. It was used as a name of a major sultanate as well as a residency in the colonial period, and continues to be used as a shorthand for the whole province of South Sumatra in the modern day. Masjawad99^💬 02:53, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

• Support per nom, and the following sources:

Nothofer, B. (1995). The History of Jakarta Malay. Oceanic Linguistics, 34(1), 87-97. doi:10.2307/3623113.

Adelaar, Alexander (2005). "Structural diversity in the Malayic subgroup" In Adelaar, K. Alexander, and Himmelmann, Nikolaus (eds.), The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. London: Routledge.

In Nothofer's paper, the language is simply called "Palembang", while Adelaar calls it "Palembang Malay". In Google scholar, the ranking of counts is

"Palembang language" > "Musi language" > "Palembang Malay language"

"Bahasa Palembang" > "Bahasa Melayu Palembang" > "Bahasa Musi".

Pinging @Kwamikagami and Sagotreespirit: –Austronesier (talk) 07:43, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

@Austronesier: Now that I've checked, it turns out that a good chunk of the results for "Musi language" in fact refers to an alternative spelling of musilanguage, LOL. Counting manually, I've found only 7 among the Google Scholar's results which use it in the linguistic sense. "Palembang Malay language" is actually more popular with 19 results. Masjawad99^💬 00:58, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

@Masjawad99: LOL, that's a perfect argument against "dumb" counts (including ngram-counts, which I recently discovered to be bunk[1]) without looking into the details of the search results. –Austronesier (talk) 07:06, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

• Support, per nom. Bahasa Palembang is a much more common term compared to bahasa Musi, which is quite obscure. The term Palembang is also used to refer to the legal traditions in the southern parts of Sumatra, as proposed by van Vollenhoven and still used in the Indonesian legal system today. David Wadie Fisher-Freberg (talk) 10:07, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
• Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 13:15, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
• Weak support. I think that by policy we probably should not move, but it makes sense for an encyclopedia to call a language by the name its speakers use, even if most of them don't speak English. With more than 3 million speakers, some of them will! Happy either way. Andrewa (talk) 03:16, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.