[liberationtech] The Internet, where languages go to die?

[David Johnson]

An interesting piece on the use of less popular languages on the Internet ...

Best,

David

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The Internet, where languages go to die?
by Ross Perlin<http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/p/ross-perlin.html> @RossPerlin<http://www.twitter.com/RossPerlin> March 18, 2014
Forget the triumphant universalism of the Web; 95 percent of languages have almost no presence online





We’re used to the triumphalist universalism of the digital utopians: Google organizes the world’s information. Facebook connects everyone. Twitter tells you what’s happening. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s all true — for a mere 5 percent of the world’s languages.

What few acknowledge is that the online world — when compared with offline, analog diversity — is very nearly a monoculture, an echo chamber where the planet’s few dominant cultures talk among themselves. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and just a handful of other languages dominate digital communication. Thanks to their sheer size and to the powerful official and commercial forces behind them, the populations that speak and write these languages can plug in, develop the necessary tools and assume that their languages will follow them into an ever-expanding range of virtual realms.

Meanwhile, despite heroic and ongoing efforts, 95 percent of all languages languish almost entirely offline. Call it the largest digital divide of them all and by far the hardest to bridge. The better-known divides, such as the lack of dependable Internet access in many communities, are real but not intractable. As a decade of modest progress has shown, there are often straightforward solutions if we’re willing to invest in them, and at least these digital have-nots can make rapid progress once plugged in. The tools may be unfamiliar, but the terrain — the language and culture framing it all — is not.

For speakers of less common languages, the issue of access is usually serious enough to begin with, but the near total absence of their languages and cultures online is demoralizing and fundamentally limiting. Knowledge of a more widely spoken language is no panacea here: The real problem is a digital architecture that forces people to operate on the terms of another culture, unable to continue the development of their own. Of course, most of the languages that are missing online have also never found their way onto television screens or radio broadcasts and have never been taught in classrooms or used in offices. But the digital realm was supposed to be different — a horizontal platform, a great equalizer that would allow everyone to communicate seamlessly with one another. What went wrong?


More ... http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/language-linguisticstechnologyinternetdigitaldivideicann.html


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