Will the Internet save minority languages, or kill them?
Many small languages lack an online presence, as only a handful of languages dominate the Web. On the other hand, we’ve never had so many tools to include other languages in the global conversation. Are we seeing digital death, or an electronic renaissance?
Linguist Daniel Midgley weighs it up on this episode of Talk the Talk.
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Show notes
About half of Wikipedia edits are now made by bots.
http://www.newsweek.com/wikipedia-edited-bots-thats-good-thing-230234
They’re doing the minor work of editing usually handled by WikiGnomes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome
Steiner’s paper (PDF)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.0412v2.pdf
We may lose half of the world’s languages in 100 years.
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/
A tiny handful of languages have an enormous web presence
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/language-linguisticstechnologyinternetdigitaldivideicann.html?ling
and while languages other than English are coming up, there’s still a divide.
http://qz.com/96054/english-is-no-longer-the-language-of-the-web/
The chart
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
Here are some stats on languages on the Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
András Kornai’s paper: Digital Language Death
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077056
and even Baltic languages are struggling.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/mar/26/digital-extinction-europe-languages-fight-survive?CMP=fb_gu
Even some well-established European languages are under-represented with regard to tech tools.
http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/key-results-and-cross-language-comparison
Wikipedia, mapped
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/nov/11/wikipedia-map-world-languages#_
Is it important to save endangered languages?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19MvWf22roO_egGdcma1rSAplMrQitKskxL3xn0gBgSU/edit#
What will it take to save them?http://phys.org/news/2014-01-minority-languages-digital-extinction.html
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/articles/saving-minority-languages-from-digital-extinction-12343.html
Google’s Endangered Language Project is helping.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9346048/Google-to-save-endangered-languages.html
http://endangeredlanguages.com/
Tuvan has an app.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17081573
But speakers have to use it. Social media can help with this.
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2014/01/16/35576/can-social-media-help-save-the-world-s-endangered/
Digital libraries are important.
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~tetaka/PDF/DLandMinority.pdf
“Conscious uncoupling”
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/celebrity/conscious-uncoupling/
10 May 2014 at 12:39 pm
Props to Daniel for tersely mentioning the Deseret alphabet, though I guess I could have seen it coming.
10 May 2014 at 12:42 pm
Wondered if anyone would notice! Thanks.