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Wikivoyage:Requests for phrasebooks Voyage Tips and guide

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The following is a list of phrasebooks that are requested by readers or contributors of Wikivoyage. (Requests for other types of articles should be posted on Wikivoyage:Requested articles.) See the Phrasebook Expedition for notes on how to start a new phrasebook using the phrasebook article template.

If you have a phrasebook that needs to be written, please add it below. The format for a request is:

*[[Name of language phrasebook]]. This is the reason that we need the phrasebook. -- ~~~~

Note that you don't have to put a justification on this page in order to start a phrasebook yourself! You can just plunge forward and start the phrasebook. Also, note that the phrasebook you are looking for may already exist – check the list of phrasebooks.

Requested phrasebooks

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Xing, this is a travel guide. Where is a tourist going to be speaking Latin? As SHB2000 said, it's out of scope. Sanskrit is spoken by over 2,000,000 people. Hardly anyone speaks Latin. Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:31, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Ikan Kekek: Ok. Xing (talk) 13:55, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Latin is spoken by more people, but they aren't fluent speakers like Sanskrit (i.e. more people can speak Latin with words here and there, but less people can speak fluent Latin, while with Sanskrit, it has more fluent speakers, but less speakers who speak a word here and there). SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:58, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Knowing how to say "et cetera", "per se", "status quo" and similar expressions that are used in English doesn't make an English-speaker a Latin-speaker in any sense, nor does knowing the words of the Latin mass. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:53, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's my level of Latin, but I have never studied the language. You can study it in many secondary schools (including mine), and of course at university. I suppose the bulk of "speakers" are those who studied it at school. The main use from our perspective is still to understand masses and inscriptions. –LPfi (talk) 20:44, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
High schools in Australia mostly used to offer Latin, German and some other European language, but now these days they either offer Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian and sometimes one European language. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:19, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree a Latin phrasebook is useless for communicating with other living humans, but I can imagine a "Latin for travellers" article as an aid to understanding inscriptions that visitors might see at historic sites. I imagine it would focus on terminology used on tombstones, churches, and pre-modern monuments. Not sure how well this would work, but I think it's more promising than a Latin phrasebook. —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:53, 9 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that that could be a useful travel topic. One example is that the abbreviations SPQR and INRI are very common in Italy generally and in churches specifically, and not everyone would know what they mean. Sure, they could just do a web search, but that's true of a lot of things on this site. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:12, 9 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm very skeptical about such an article, which would be similar to explaining how to learn to read and write in English, Swahili and Finnish since they're all written in Roman letters. What useful guide could be written about how to learn to read and write in Arabic, Farsi, Mandinka and Malay in Arabic-based script? They use different letters, are members of different language families, and have different sounds. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:12, 9 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We have Learning Devanagari. I don't know how useful that article is, or whether the considerations for Arabic script are similar. —Granger (talk · contribs) 14:23, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know, either, but tell me whether you think a "Learning Roman letters" would be useful, and you have the answer I'm alluding to. If all the languages that use Devanagari script use the same syllables and pronounce them pretty much the same way, that article might be useful. Or it could be useful to narrowly define an article to teach people to read and write Classical Arabic or, say, Urdu, specifically, but attempting to teach people how to read and write all languages that use the Arabic alphabet in one go is absurd. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:11, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that "attempting to teach people how to read and write all languages that use the Arabic alphabet in one go is absurd", and it is hard for me to imagine a "Learning Roman letters" article being particularly useful, at least for readers who are already familiar with at least one alphabetic script. (For readers who have never used an alphabetic script, maybe there would be value to an article explaining the basics of how an alphabetic script works, I'm not sure.) However, I know that the Arabic and Devanagari scripts are structured differently from ours, so I don't know if there is enough to learn about how the script actually works to justify a writing system guide to be used in conjunction with the phrasebooks. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:59, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I do know how to read and write in Jawi (Malay in Arabic letters), or did know enough to pass the class at the 6th-grade level and still can to some degree, and I know enough to know that it's very different from trying to read things in Arabic or Urdu. Arabic is an alphabet (scripts have to do with calligraphy, but the basic written units in Arabic are letters, not characters or syllables), but vowels are represented very differently in different languages, there are traditional spellings in Jawi that are quite different from phonetic Roman spellings, and the additional consonants needed in different languages also differ, so that for example, a nya in Malay is a pa in Urdu. I maintain that this is an overbroad topic, and that it would be better to deal with written Urdu completely separately from written Arabic, etc. It's possible that Farsi and Urdu writing might be similar enough to deal with in a single article, but we'd need someone who knows both languages to pass judgment on that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:58, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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