Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4139960-20130707225455/@comment-188432-20130710152240

T:NAMING requires article names be nouns. The only noun that the word French describes — without help from any other words — is the language. Otherwise it is an demonymal adjective, not a noun. Alternately, it can be converted into a mass noun using a prepending article — the French. But that meaning requires the prepending the. French on its own does not mean "the French people". Since French can only mean "the language spoken primarily in France", the term French language is kinda redundant. The article name should simply be French. This is true of pretty much every other real world language, cause "real world English" works fairly consistently in this way.

Obviously some of the made-up languages do require a dab term because "baby" and "horse", for instance, have other noun meanings. These "new nouns" haven't been forged in the crucible of history, so they don't work according to the same pattern of "real" language names — unless the writer actually gave it some thought.

So ComicBookGoddess was right to try to move that redirect target to the language, not the country. She didn't have the power to change all the instances and move the page properly, so it created a bit of a mess. But her basic thought was correct.

When there is a need for the word "language" for clarity, it should probably be parenthetically, as this can be easily pipe tricked away. baby (language) is easier than baby

Like all of us responding to this thread, I too have been partially responsible for this mess. It's really going to take a bot to fix all this, since, as Tybort has pointed out, we've been doing it wrongly for so many years.

But the basic deal is that most of our languages from the real world should simply have the "language" dropped. There are exceptions — like Russian and Egyptian — but where such exceptions exist, the dab term should be parenthetical.