Talk:Russian-Canadian

RFD discussion: February–May 2022

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Russian-Canadian

Ukrainian-Canadian

German-Canadian

English-Canadian

French-Canadian

Portuguese-Canadian

Danish-Canadian

Swedish-Canadian

Norwegian-Canadian

Italian-Canadian

SoP. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 20:38, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

• delete - per British Pakistani precedent. Overlordnat1 (talk) 20:48, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Delete. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 21:17, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Leaning keep for English-Canadian & French-Canadian because of how they're often juxtaposed due to the social geography and sociopolitics of the country, and how they're not just simply "related to x person who comes from France/England". For the others, I wouldn't be opposed to deleting, and I wonder if the others are really used to mean "related to a Canadian person who speaks y language". AG202 (talk) 20:49, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Delete Vininn126 (talk) 21:31, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Keep all. We have African American, Italian American, Mexican American, Russian-American, etc., so there isn't an argument for purging these unless one wishes to seriously argue that the U.S. is somehow more worthy of lexical documentation than Canada. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 07:00, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

I will say that African American is markedly different as it is means "American and Black" and not "American and of African descent", meaning that it wouldn't be used for white Africans and would be used for Black folks from places outside of Africa, for example. So the circumstances are different. For the others, I do see your point, though Mexican American already has a {{lit}} for the noun sense and has been nominated below already for the adjective sense, along with Irish American, so I wouldn't be surprised if the other ones are later nominated as well. AG202 (talk) 07:15, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

African is a synonym for black (albeit an imprecise and dated one), and thus one might argue that African-American is SOP. (I don't agree with that reasoning, but hardline deletionists might). But the picture being painted here seems to be that Mexican American and Irish American were only nominated as an afterthought after a slew of Canada-related entries. And more editors are stepping forward with arguments in favour of keeping those two entries than any of the Canadian ones. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 07:47, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

So is your stance that any combination of nationalities is worthy of being kept, as long as three citations can be scrounged to back it up? E.g., consider Italian Turk [1][2][3]. I'm sure the vast majority of the roughly 200^2 possibilities (Qatari Cambodian, Bahamian Tunisian, etc.) would be ruled out by attestation requirements, but I wonder how many actually used terms like this there are. 70.172.194.25 08:12, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Do have a salient explanation for why Irish American should inspire a lengthy discussion but the two most prominent enthocultural groups in Canada get nominated for deletion with nary a peep? WordyAndNerdy (talk) 08:50, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't really have one, other than perhaps US-centrism. But then again, some of the people arguing in the Irish American RfD discussion aren't American.

My comment above applies to all nationality combinations (from Irish American to British Pakistani). The options are either allowing any such formation that has three quotations (seems against the consensus in the British Pakistani RfD), allowing none (possibly going against the Irish American RfD, but that still remains to be seen), or having fine-grained criteria for determining "importance"/"lexicality". If we're going with the third option then I would at least like to know where we're setting the boundary line. 70.172.194.25 09:33, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm uncertain as to whether it would be possible to create clear and consistent guidelines for such terms. I'm in favour of a case-by-case approach, but "Does it have a Wikipedia article?" is a pretty good barometer, in my experience. If an ethnic/cultural identity has a Wikipedia article, it's likely been the subject of academic texts, documentaries, novels, films, etc. It's relevant to the documentation of language in a way that a thousand hypotheticals will never be.

Wiktionary would certainly be doing itself no favours by further entrenching an apparent US-centrism. This is one of those cases where it would behoove editors to step back and consider whether they may be examining an issue with a blind spot. "English-Canadian" and "French-Canadian" aren't just two of the largest ethnocultural groups in Canada. They arguably represent the main sociopolitical (and linguistic) division in Canada. Ukrainian-Canadians are a significant ethnic group, representing 2.7% of the population, in contrast to the U.S., where Ukrainian-Americans represent 0.3% of the population. Immigrants from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe made up a significant proportion of the settlers of the prairie provinces. That continues to shape the identities of residents of those provinces to this day. These are things that Canadians and people familiar with Canada are likely to know, but those outside of that sphere generally wouldn't. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 11:16, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

It would probably also be worth having entries for Afro-Canadian and Indo-Canadian, since these notably diverge from the (most prominent) equivalent American terms. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 11:20, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

WordyAndNerdy My simple answer for why Irish American inspired a lengthy discussion is because it’s a community I know more about. I’m regretting not getting involved in British Pakistani, too, as that is also a community I know more about and I suspect it was US centrism (and perhaps the lack of realisation that it is a sizeable community in the UK) that resulted in its deletion - despite the fact that its word order is reversed, which is an important difference in making such terms not SoP. Theknightwho (talk) 13:49, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Delete most of these as trivial SOP combinations, although "French-Canadian" and "English-Canadian" are a bit different as discussed above so I would keep those. If the others are kept, sense 1 (use for any Canadian who speaks Russian, even if they have no Russian ancestry and just learned it at university) needs to be RFVed and will probably fail; based on the edit history, who added it and when, I strongly suspect it's only the phenomenon of "list multiple descriptors of the people the term describes, as if they were multiple definitions" and not even really intended as a claim that the university language-learner should be counted. - -sche (discuss) 16:35, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Delete. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:13, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Delete all. Italian American and Russian-American should be deleted as well. Old Man Consequences (talk) 22:09, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Deleted, except for French-Canadian and English-Canadian, for which there is no consensus to delete. bd2412 T 04:53, 2 May 2022 (UTC)