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About the latest revert to the last version by Austronesier
@Austronesier: With this, you have undone all the edits which were made on this article in the last two days, something with which I cannot agree. First, my own reformulations were - of course- made for several good reasons. Second, even though I do disagree as well with the greater part of Vlaemink's edits here and on similar topics elsewhere, I think the addition/clarification "Sociolinguistically" was correct anyway here, and could easily have been kept.
No. "A group of homogenous language varieties" is meaningless. What is homogenous? South Low Franconian? That's obviously incorrect. Every source will tell you that South Low Franconian is hardly defined by any exclusively shared innovation, but rather as a traditional zone of isoglosses that link it either to other Low Franconian dialect groups or to Ripuarian and which cut right through the South Low Franconian area. Goossens (1965) gives a nice overview of it, for details there are multiple other good sources. Or are the indivdual varieties homogenous? The fact that the speech of one town is fairly homogenous is trivial, and we wouldn't mention it in any other article about a linguistic grouping. The contintental West Germanic (to the exclusion of Frisian) forms dialect continuum, and every grouping within this continuum is a "dialect group". This is most NPOV way to about it. "Refers to" is bad (see WP:REFERSTO).
The traditional assignment of SLFr dialects as dialects of either German or Dutch is not just based on sociolinguistics; that's Goossens' modern twist of it. It has largely to do with Dutch ressentments against the common German scholarly view of Dutch as part of Niederdeutsch at least in early times of Germanic studies. This ressentment deepened with the bitter experiences of WWII. It was a Belgian (Goossens) who broke the ice and paved the for cross-border studies by scholars like Giesbert and Bakker.
With homogenous language varieties, I simply meant to express the fact that the diverse dialects which make up together the group linguistically referred to as "South Low Franconian" are mutually homogenous enough for this classification to be made. I do realize this may actually seem rather self-evident; yet I believe the formulation I had put down is preferable over calling it "a dialect group", which seems an oversimplification here. De Wikischim (talk) 14:56, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Drawing borders in a dialect continuum is always a simplification. It presupposes a hierarchy in the mesh of linguistic boundaries which sometimes does exist, but often not. For South Low Franconian, primacy is given to the Benrath line, and on the other side to the Uerdingen line (or the accent line in more modern approaches). It is a greater oversimplification to call this set of lects "homogenous" when "dialect group" gives due focus on its internal diversity (hence "group") and at the same time also its internal coherence (hence "group"). I gather from the first version of your comment that it is the very word "dialect" that initially triggered your aversion to the original text. –Austronesier (talk) 15:33, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Regarding this last issue: indeed, more or less. To my idea, "dialect" as a linguistic term is too often used in an improper way (for example, to denote a whole continuum of related dialects, as in this case too). Something that I think should certain be avoided is a description like "West German dialect", which only creates new confusion. De Wikischim (talk) 15:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
