Right now the tag germany has a description that says it is only for the country and not the language, but German was used in many countries outside Germany, so perhaps the tag should be edited or a new one added, such as German-Language.
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2 Answers
Yes, if it's used for questions about the German language as it relates to genealogy.
We have the latin tag – I believe the only language tag currently – which has usage guidance:
For questions about interpreting or translating genealogical records written in Latin
Something similar for the German language would suffice.
For any new tags created please write a brief usage guidance.
At this stage, in my opinion we should avoid very locale specific tags such as status-animarum and kurrent. The latter would be better tagged german-language. I don't think we want a tag for every style of handwriting that ever existed; indeed it is often difficult to assign a particular script unambiguously to one specific category. Status animarum is a type of vital record, so would be better tagged vital-records.
Tags are for grouping questions together in a useful way, not for pigeonholing them.
Previous post of mine relating to this topic (there may be others):
Better defining the palaeography, transcriptions, translation, language(?) tags?
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I agree with all your points here but will also link genealogy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1888 which advocated language tags for a different reason. That related to LOTE questions.– PolyGeo ModCommented Dec 18, 2017 at 5:08
I think this is a reasonable idea (which can be generalised for other record langauges). However, I'd prefer to tag with german-records to make it clear that it's about understanding/interpreting records in German rather than about the language itself.
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2'German records' sounds to me like records from Germany, and I doubt many people would read the usage guidance to appreciate the distinction between records in German vs records from Germany. It seems a waste of 3 tags to tag germany, say birth-records, and german-records, when the first two really suffice. Of course, the same could be said of german-language however the name of the tag makes it more clear that it is referring to the language.– Harry V. ModCommented Dec 18, 2017 at 15:13
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1What about Swizerland and German-records? (Or indeed USA and German-records as I understand some churches in America kept their recordsin German). However, I think we're only disagreeing on the name of the tag, not its utility.– user6485Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 15:23
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@HarryVervet With longer tag names allowable now perhaps a tag of german-language-records would reflect precisely what we want to convey.– PolyGeo ModCommented Dec 19, 2017 at 1:27
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@Polygeo One problem with longer tag names is that they can reduce the 'real estate' on (e.g.) Google search results -- the most popular tag on a question is prepended to the question title -- probably not an issue for this particular tage but we need to think before we extend some tag lengths.– user6485Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 7:44
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I'd not considered that but I think it just means that we should only use them when we really need to.– PolyGeo ModCommented Dec 19, 2017 at 9:18
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For the case @ColeValleyGirl posed in the comments, why not Switzerland + German + birth-records?– Jan Murphy ModCommented Dec 20, 2017 at 21:07
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@JanMurphy Yes, if we adopt a "German" tag for the language -- tag for the place, the record-type and the language.– user6485Commented Dec 21, 2017 at 8:09