"Tag spag" on the tips of some of our tongues, but not others

Question

Here's another plate full of tag spaghetti where we go out of our way to avoid being consistent.

Language tags:

Some languages get their very own tag all to themselves. I brought this up years ago and lost to the opposing idea that a tag for every language is a great idea. (I wasn't convinced.)

• georgian (2)
• japanese (6)
• portuguese (1)
• russian (6)
• spanish (4)
• ukrainian (2)

Yet we haven't followed through on that afterwards. Since then some tags created for individual languages have been merged into the languages tag. But others are still wild and free.

• arabic
• english

Do we ignore the previous discussion and make them all synonyms of languages?

Or do we ignore the trend of not making new per-language tags and go through all current questions about languages to give them the correct specific tags, and de-synonymize the tags merged into languages against the outcome of the previous discussion?

Answer 1

As far as consistency goes, you are right -- we need to agree on a policy and follow it through.

I'm not convinced by your argument that all language-related questions should be tagged languges -- I mostly agree with Andrew Grimm's answer to the question you linked to. It's similar to countries -- not very informative, and unlikely many people are going to be interested in it.

However, I see problems with tag names such as english, japanese etc., which may also refer to the nationality as well as the language itself. We already have the -citizens suffix for nationality. What I propose instead:

• Un-synonimize english, arabic and any other language-related tag that currently exist.
• Rename existing language tags to have the suffix -language, even when language names are unambiguous, such as telugu, sanskrit, or whatever. This will facilitate searching for language questions if one is so inclined, by using [*-language] or similar as a query.
• Eliminate languages altogether. Unlikely a question would need more than three language tags, which makes it superfluous.

I'm expecting your comments below. If there are disagreeing opinions on this, I'll move it to a separate question to have a contained discussion there.

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Update:

Existing language tags (or at least, those I was able to find) are now renamed. english and arabic were un-synonimized from languages and were made synonyms to the newly-created english-language and arabic-language, respectively.