Module:languages/documentation

This module is used to retrieve and manage the languages that can have Wiktionary entries, and the information associated with them. See Wiktionary:Languages for more information.

For the languages and language varieties that may be used in etymologies, see Module:etymology languages. For language families, which sometimes also appear in etymologies, see Module:families.

This module provides access to other modules. To access the information from within a template, see Module:languages/templates.

The information itself is stored in the various data modules that are subpages of this module. These modules should not be used directly by any other module, the data should only be accessed through the functions provided by this module.

Data submodules:

Two-letter codes
Three-letter codes by their first letter: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Codes containing hyphens (-)

Extra data submodules (for less frequently used data):

Two-letter codes
Three-letter codes by their first letter: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Codes containing hyphens (-)

Finding and retrieving languages

The module exports a number of functions that are used to find languages.

getByCode

getByCode(code, paramForError, allowEtymLang, allowFamily)

Finds the language whose code matches the one provided. If it exists, it returns a Language object representing the language. Otherwise, it returns nil, unless paramForError is given, in which case an error is generated. If paramForError is true, a generic error message mentioning the bad code is generated; otherwise paramForError should be a string or number specifying the parameter that the code came from, and this parameter will be mentioned in the error message along with the bad code. If allowEtymLang is specified, etymology language codes are allowed and looked up along with normal language codes. If allowFamily is specified, language family codes are allowed and looked up along with normal language codes.

getByCanonicalName

getByCanonicalName(code, paramForError, allowEtymLang, allowFamily)

Finds the language whose canonical name (the name used to represent that language on Wiktionary) or other name matches the one provided. If it exists, it returns a Language object representing the language. Otherwise, it returns nil, unless paramForError is given, in which case an error is generated. If allowEtymLang is specified, etymology language codes are allowed and looked up along with normal language codes. If allowFamily is specified, language family codes are allowed and looked up along with normal language codes.

The canonical name of languages should always be unique (it is an error for two languages on Wiktionary to share the same canonical name), so this is guaranteed to give at most one result.

This function is powered by Module:languages/canonical names, which contains a pre-generated mapping of non-etymology-language canonical names to codes. It is generated by going through the Category:Language data modules for non-etymology languages. When allowEtymLang is specified for the above function, Module:etymology languages/by name may also be used, and when allowFamily is specified for the above function, Module:families/by name may also be used.

getByName

getByName(name)

Like getByCanonicalName(), except it also looks at the otherNames listed in the non-etymology language data modules, and does not (currently) have options to look up etymology languages and families.

getNonEtymological

getNonEtymological(lang)

If given an etymology language, this iterates through parents until a regular language or family is found, and the corresponding object is returned. If given a regular language or family, the object itself is returned.

Finding all languages

Use Module:languages/iterateAll to find all languages.

Language objects

A Language object is returned from one of the functions above. It is a Lua representation of a language and the data associated with it. It has a number of methods that can be called on it, using the : syntax. For example:

local m_languages = require("Module:languages")
local lang = m_languages.getByCode("fr")
local name = lang:getCanonicalName()
-- "name" will now be "French"

Language:getCode

:getCode()

Returns the language code of the language. Example: "fr" for French.

Language:getCanonicalName

:getCanonicalName()

Returns the canonical name of the language. This is the name used to represent that language on Wiktionary, and is guaranteed to be unique to that language alone. Example: "French" for French.

Language:getDisplayForm

:getDisplayForm()

Returns the display form of the language. The display form of a language, family or script is the form it takes when appearing as the SOURCE in categories such as English terms derived from SOURCE or English given names from SOURCE, and is also the displayed text in :makeCategoryLink links. For regular and etymology languages, this is the same as the canonical name, but for families, it reads "NAME languages" (e.g. "Indo-Iranian languages"), and for scripts, it reads "NAME script" (e.g. "Arabic script").

Language:getOtherNames

:getOtherNames(onlyOtherNames)

Returns a table of the "other names" that the language is known by, excluding the canonical name. The names are not guaranteed to be unique, in that sometimes more than one language is known by the same name. Example: {"Manx Gaelic", "Northern Manx", "Southern Manx"} for Manx. If onlyOtherNames is given and is non-nil, only names explicitly listed in the otherNames field are returned; otherwise, names listed under otherNames, aliases and varieties are combined together and returned. For example, for Manx, Manx Gaelic is listed as an alias, while Northern Manx and Southern Manx are listed as varieties. It should be noted that the otherNames field itself is deprecated, and entries listed there should eventually be moved to either aliases or varieties.

Language:getAliases

:getAliases()

Returns a table of the aliases that the language is known by, excluding the canonical name. Aliases are synonyms for the language in question. The names are not guaranteed to be unique, in that sometimes more than one language is known by the same name. Example: {"High German", "New High German", "Deutsch"} for German.

Language:getVarieties

:getVarieties(flatten)

Returns a table of the known subvarieties of a given language, excluding subvarieties that have been given explicit etymology language codes. The names are not guaranteed to be unique, in that sometimes a given name refers to a subvariety of more than one language. Example: {"Southern Aymara", "Central Aymara"} for Aymara. Note that the returned value can have nested tables in it, when a subvariety goes by more than one name. Example: {"North Azerbaijani", "South Azerbaijani", {"Afshar", "Afshari", "Afshar Azerbaijani", "Afchar"}, {"Qashqa'i", "Qashqai", "Kashkay"}, "Sonqor"} for Azerbaijani. Here, for example, Afshar, Afshari, Afshar Azerbaijani and Afchar all refer to the same subvariety, whose preferred name is Afshar (the one listed first). To avoid a return value with nested tables in it, specify a non-nil value for the flatten parameter; in that case, the return value would be {"North Azerbaijani", "South Azerbaijani", "Afshar", "Afshari", "Afshar Azerbaijani", "Afchar", "Qashqa'i", "Qashqai", "Kashkay", "Sonqor"}.

Language:getType

:getType()

Returns the type of language, which can be "regular", "reconstructed" or "appendix-constructed".

Language:getWikimediaLanguages

:getWikimediaLanguages()

Returns a table containing WikimediaLanguage objects (see Module:wikimedia languages), which represent languages and their codes as they are used in Wikimedia projects for interwiki linking and such. More than one object may be returned, as a single Wiktionary language may correspond to multiple Wikimedia languages. For example, Wiktionary's single code sh (Serbo-Croatian) maps to four Wikimedia codes: sh (Serbo-Croatian), bs (Bosnian), hr (Croatian) and sr (Serbian).

The code for the Wikimedia language is retrieved from the wikimedia_codes property in the data modules. If that property is not present, the code of the current language is used. If none of the available codes is actually a valid Wikimedia code, an empty table is returned.

Language:getWikipediaArticle

:getWikipediaArticle()

Returns the name of the Wikipedia article for the language. If the property wikipedia_article is present in the data module it will be used first, otherwise a sitelink will be generated from :getWikidataItem (if set). Otherwise :getCategoryName is used as fallback.

Language:getWikidataItem

:getWikidataItem()

Returns the Wikidata item id for the language or nil. This corresponds to the the second field in the data modules.

Language:getScripts

:getScripts()

Returns a table of Script objects for all scripts that the language is written in. See Module:scripts.

Language:getScriptCodes

:getScriptCodes()

Returns the table of script codes in the language's data file.

Language:getFamily

:getFamily()

Returns a Family object for the language family that the language belongs to. See Module:families.

Language:getAncestors

:getAncestors()

Returns a table of Language objects for all languages that this language is directly descended from. Generally this is only a single language, but creoles, pidgins and mixed languages can have multiple ancestors.

Language:getCategoryName

:getCategoryName(nocap)

Returns the name of the main category of that language. Example: "French language" for French, whose category is at Category:French language. Unless optional argument nocap is given, the language name at the beginning of the returned value will be capitalized. This capitalization is correct for category names, but not if the language name is lowercase and the returned value of this function is used in the middle of a sentence.

Language:makeCategoryLink

:makeCategoryLink()

Creates a link to the category; the link text is the canonical name.

Language:makeEntryName

:makeEntryName(term)

Converts the given term into the form used in the names of entries. This removes diacritical marks from the term if they are not considered part of the normal written form of the language, and which therefore are not permitted in page names. It also removes certain punctuation characters like final question marks or periods which are never present in page names. Example for Latin: "amō" → "amo" (macron is removed).

The replacements made by this function are defined by the entry_name setting for each language in the data modules.

Language:makeSortKey

:makeSortKey(entryName)

Creates a sort key for the given entry name, following the rules appropriate for the language. This removes diacritical marks from the entry name if they are not considered significant for sorting, and may perform some other changes. Any initial hyphen is also removed, and anything parentheses is removed as well.

The sort_key setting for each language in the data modules defines the replacements made by this function, or it gives the name of the module that takes the entry name and returns a sortkey.

Language:transliterate

:transliterate(text, sc, module_override)

Transliterates the text from the given script into the Latin script (see Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization). The language must have the translit_module property for this to work; if it is not present, nil is returned.

The sc parameter is handled by the transliteration module, and how it is handled is specific to that module. Some transliteration modules may tolerate nil as the script, others require it to be one of the possible scripts that the module can transliterate, and will show an error if it's not one of them. For this reason, the sc parameter should always be provided when writing non-language-specific code.

The module_override parameter is used to override the default module that is used to provide the transliteration. This is useful in cases where you need to demonstrate a particular module in use, but there is no default module yet, or you want to demonstrate an alternative version of a transliteration module before making it official. It should not be used in real modules or templates, only for testing. All uses of this parameter are tracked by Template:tracking/module_override.

Language:hasTranslit

:hasTranslit()

Returns true if the language has a transliteration module, false if it doesn't.

Language:getRawData

:getRawData()

This function is not for use in entries or other content pages.

Returns a blob of data about the language. The format of this blob is undocumented, and perhaps unstable; it's intended for things like the module's own unit-tests, which are "close friends" with the module and will be kept up-to-date as the format changes.

Language:getRawExtraData

:getRawExtraData()