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I had a question about learning modern (spoken) Greek, and my first attempt was to look for https://greek.stackexchange.com, but there is no such real site (now). After some digging, I found https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com, where I asked my question.

Would it make sense to have the catchall *.stackexchange.com site where names of languages (perhaps this list could be limited to languages mentioned on meta.SE), instead of saying e.g. "Couldn't find greek.stackexhange.com", instead say something like "There is presently no standalone greek.stackexchange.com site. You may be interested in languagelearning.stackexchange.com."?

By the way, I noticed that (on my high-resolution laptop screen) on meta.SE, ll.SE is buried in the next to last row. If that site serves as a catchall for all languages that presently have no dedicated SE site, perhaps it could be more prominently mentioned, possibly with some description that would say "Some languages, including [list of languages], have their own dedicated sites and are the preferred sites for questions about learning and teaching those languages" or the like?

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    But on that page you landed on it said or see a complete directory of all our Q&A sites at stackexchange.com. where the last word is a link to the site list. Isn't that more then enough help? For Greek I can see what the suggestion would be but what to do with other stuff that people try as domainname?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 14:38
  • how're you going to know which non-sites are language?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 14:40
  • I also wonder how often legit users land on this page and then give up.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 14:45
  • Small caveat I think of, some language sites doesn't accept learning question, IIRC French Language policy redirect learning questions to Language Learning so maybe that's more a problem of finding language learning at first than a language specific site.
    – Tensibai
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 15:22
  • @rene, I'm not proposing a universal way to improve everything. I'm proposing a specific way to improve one thing.
    – Christos Hayward
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 19:54

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While it sounds simple - it doesn't sound like a particularly practical idea to me. While SE has a fairly clever system for managing domain names, you're essentially going to semi-arbitrarily point a set of domain names at a specific site, and you'd need to work out which languages need them, and how/when/where to point them. With Seasoned Advice and Arqade, it's a specific, one-to-one mapping, not a many-to-one mapping, and you'd need to get someone to set up all the 'plumbing' every time one of these things comes up - thankfully SE certs are wildcards - so that's taken care of, but you'd essentially be doing a lot of the stuff you'd need to do to stand up a new site, creating domain names, redirecting them or setting up the records to point them in the right place, creating vhost like things and so on. It's a bunch of work.

On the other hand, discoverability of language sites as a whole doesn't feel very good. Perhaps having a separate language category, considering there's a fair number of these sites might be a suitable compromise.

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