Tag Synonym Request: “Irish English” → “Hiberno-English”

Question

tl;dr:

1. Wikipedia uses Hiberno-English as the canonical form and uses Irish English as the autolinked-to synonym for the same thing.
2. Irish–English with a dash and Irish-English with a hyphen are two different things, a fine distinction that we cannot represent in tags due to lack of en-dash support. In contrast, Hiberno-English suffers no such ambiguity.
3. No matter which of hiberno-english or irish-english is chosen as the canonical form, those should not be two different tags; one should be the synonym of the other.

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I’ve gone through and retagged all the questions tagged with Irish-English to be tagged with Hiberno-English. I’ve also spruced up its tag wiki and excerpt a wee bit.

Could we therefore please have a tag synonym/merge/magical-alias created so that whenever someone types in “Irish English” for a tag, this gets automagically retagged to “Hiberno-English” instead?

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Background and Reasoning:

The canonical name for this on Wikipedia is Hiberno-English, which is why I chose that version of the tag. Now, they do recognize the synonym: if you look up Irish English on Wikipedia, you will notice how it automatically redirects you to the Hiberno-English link. All I’m asking if for us to have the same sort of aliasing that they do, to help prevent confusion.

Why they should have chosen the H-version as the canonical form and the I-version as the synonym — rather than vice versa — I cannot say for sure. I only know that is what they have done, and it seems sensible enough to me.

Certainly the word Irish used alone when referring to language leaves it ambiguous whether it’s an English tongue or a Celtic one that’s under discussion. Imagine if you are talking “Irish–English relations”, like “US–UK relations”: both of those are talking about two different countries, and it is asking a lot for people to tell the difference between an en dash and a hyphen in Irish–English compared with Irish-English (Plus our tagset doesn’t support dashes, only hyphens.) With “Hiberno-English”, no such ambiguity exists, so for that reason if no other it seems the preferable term.

I don’t actually care particularly strongly just which one of Hiberno-English or Irish English winds up being the canonical version. I just think that because the two terms do in fact here on ELU refer to the same thing, there should not be two distinct tags for the same thing. That requires a tag synonym and a merge.

I did the work of the retagging because there were questions in both tags, but I don’t strongly care how it reads provided that the two spellings go to the same place. This is exactly what tag synonyms are for. But because there are only a couple of dozen questions with this tag, we don’t have the power as tagsyn voters to effect this change. That’s why this is a support request for moderatorial intervention.

If people have an allergy to Hiberno-English as “too fancy” and don’t care that “Irish-English” is ambiguous in a way that the former term is not, so be it. There still should be only a pair of synonyms. But those same people will probably also next request that the Orthography tag and its tag-synonym Spelling have their canonicity reversed.

Answer 1

As requested by tchrist:

Unlike Hugo, I would prefer Hiberno-English as the main tag.

Within the field of linguistics (as applied to Ireland and her languages in particular), Hiberno-English (or Hibernian English) and Irish English are actually two distinct terms with (slightly) different meanings:

• Hiberno-English is the variant of English that is currently spoken in various dialects on the Emerald Isle (Republic and Northern Ireland)
• Irish English is English spoken as a second language by native Irish speakers, with all the usual first-language influences that entails.

In other words, a speaker of Hiberno-English is normally a native English speaker (who may or may not even know that a great many of the words they use is of Irish origin), while a speaker of Irish English is not.

Given that ELU is about English, not Irish, Hiberno-English is of greater relevance to our needs.

This distinction is (usually) upheld when dealing with the current status of Irish and English in Ireland today in linguistic articles, etc.; but outside this narrow scope, they are nearly always synonymic, and even linguists who are not specialised in Ireland in particular often use them indiscriminately.

As such, it would be absurdly persnickety and nitpickety of us to have separate, non-synonymic tags for the two here (especially since one of them would be all but useless in our context anyway), and I thus agree entirely with Hugo that they should be synonymised; but I think we should let ourselves be guided by the consensus within the field, even if it isn’t very widely known outside a small field of scholars.

Answer 2

I agree to make the two synonyms.

I'd prefer Irish-English to be the main tag and Hiberno-English to redirect to it, as it's perhaps a bit clearer, but don't mind too much either way.