I've found the lang attribute and :lang pseudo-class to be pretty useful in publishing for private tribal use documents in my (critically endangered) language. Unfortunately there isn't any standard way of distinguishing between the various scripts/orthographies, so we've extended the language names for that purpose.
Our work isn't listed on any of these pages about which indigenous languages are on the internet because we don't want it to be, these pages are for tribal citizen use only. So, there may be a lot more written languages in use somehow than the author believes. But who knows.
Continuing on your line of thought, and being a bit pedantic, the title says missing from the internet, but it looks more like missing from websites.
There is a lot of internet interaction that happens privately/semi-privately in chat applications like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, etc.
From my limited personal experience, communities who speak and are able to write in minority languages continue to do so in their communication via these apps even though they may have a small appearance on public websites. Of course, for communities that do no have a written form for their language or very few know it, then this is less likely the case.
The world has always had a handful of linguae francae. Greek, Aramaic, Latin, English (Python, JavaScript), etc. each serve(d) valuable purposes. This article seems to cast standardized communication in a negative, borderline (if not outright) discriminatory light, which struck me as odd.
I think it's a bit oxymoronic to have a lingua franca that's also the target of unfair discrimination. Of course you can have elitism, but in the end most people have to trade with the common coin.
A language carries a history, a culture, a literature (not necessarily written!) and an identity. Abandoning a minority language abandons those.
It's very easy for native English speakers to say English should be the only language because it has only upsides for them, and they need not give up anything, and they have never been coerced into using it. Whereas I suspect 99% of people who say things like "we don't need UTF-8, the world can be ASCII-only" would go absolutely bananas if they woke up tomorrow and found that HN was now a mandatory-Mandarin forum.
Some minority languages were actively suppressed during the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was part of the point of the "residential schools" system of Canada, Australia and elsewhere: take children away from their parents and beat their language out of them.
A few languages have managed to go from repressed to national language status: Irish, Hebrew, probably others.
Hebrew is the only successfully revived language that I know of, and it was revived under circumstances that are really pretty unique.
Irish has had "national language" status for 100 years, during which time it has continued to decline. Strong government support for the language - making it a requirement for government jobs, teaching it to schoolchildren, defining regions of the country where Irish should be the primary everyday language - weren't enough to prevent the continued decline of the language.
I think the problem with the sort of language policy that Ireland pursued is that language is a practical tool for most people. A lot of people liked the idea of Irish coming back (especially back when speaking Irish was a political statement against English colonialism), but in everyday life in Ireland, English is vastly more useful. The last monolingual Irish speaker died in 1998.[1] You will never encounter anyone who only knows how to speak Irish. Back when there were monolingual Irish speakers, they lived in some of the poorest areas of Ireland and hoped that their children would learn English, so that they would have better opportunities.
In some ways, the language policy backfired. Some people actually viewed it as oppressive, because they didn't see the point of learning a language that was of no practical use to them in everyday life, and they weren't able to get certain jobs unless they spoke that language.
There's a funny TV series that explores how useful the Irish language is in everyday life, which aired on Ireland's Irish-language station.[2] The host tries to go through his life using only Irish. Most of the Irish people he encounters have the proficiency of your average adult who took a foreign language many years ago in school and never used it again. A few people can speak it well. Many more are confused. But it's sobering to watch it and think about what it would actually take to revive Irish as the primary language of communication in Ireland, or why you would want to do so.
With Irish, there's also the peculiarity that it's not really the language of Irish culture. Ireland is world-famous for its English-language literature.
These were almost all languages of a particular class, usually the ruling class. And typically the establishment of a lingua franca involved the suppression of other local languages - the story of French is a classic example.
Relatedly, I'd like to plug Wikibabel (http://www.wikibabel.com/). It's translating wikipedia from English to Swahili, with hopefully more languages to follow.
This is impressive. I clicked on that link to show you that my language isn't there. I don't even know how it is possible. The whole website is available in Pular! (Aka fulani / fulfulde / etc) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702404
This is silly. I don't write in my native language because I want everyone to understand what I have to say. If you want to be part of the conversation, just learn English. It's really, really easy. I never even spend any effort on learning the language.
I make an active effort to use my native language whenever I get an opportunity to do so. I see it as an accessibility feature. Much easier to understand things when they're in your native language.
How is it accessible when you're limiting your audience to people speaking your native language? Also, English is easier to understand than my native language, which lends itself to getting unnecessary convoluted. Especially when studying, I always look first at English resources, since the one in my native language are made more difficult to understand because of the complexity of the language itself. (My first language is German.)
If I have an audience that entirely speaks the language I try to take advantage of it. It's very common here for people to use English unconditionally in conversations about technology.
I'd say the article doesn't really mean what it reads. It repeats american democratic party line which tries to appeal to hispanic and black demographic this way to win their votes.
When I am addressing to my home folks, I write in my native language.
When I am addressing to an international audience, I am writing in (poor) English because it is the lingua franca of the world now, pretty much like latin was 1000 years ago.
One of the characteristics I love about English the most is the wanton, shameless adoption of not just words but entire phrases into the lexicon. 'Frankish Tongue', nah lingua franca it is. 'long time no see' is another favorite example. Ungrammatical in English, direct word-for-word translation from Mandarin? Sure, come on in, the water's fine. No one bats an eye.
Almost all languages have lots of borrowing. And we have German, where instead of borrowing, they make up words from other words, having some nice things such as:
There is no linguistic difference between German and English in this respect, only a difference in spelling rules. English usually puts spaces between compounds, German doesn't. If English had the same spelling rules, that "word" would be "legalprotectioninsurancecompanies" rather than "legal protection insurance companies".
No, English isn't the weird one, French is. All languages except for French just adopt phrases from other languages. But for French they couldn't just use "computer" or "PC", like pretty much every other language out there. They had to invent their own word: l'ordinateur, if I remember correctly. And they do this with every foreign word.
French certainly does take it to extremes. I get the feeling (I don't live where French is spoken often, so I mostly interact with it online, so I could be mistaken) that most people ignore what the Académie Française has to say on the matter, though.
And the ironic thing is that modern English is heavily influenced by French, which was once the lingua franca. Just like a lot of words in my native language (Dutch) are now being influenced or replaced by the current lingua franca, English; here [1] is a list of new words added to a dictionary in 2015 (couldn't find a more recent one, but I know "boomer" was added recently); a lot of English words like "onesie", "filesharing", "steadycam" and "raw food" and combinations like "gamificatie", "tinderen" and "dronepiloot" were added. Take this process over decades or hundreds of years like what happened with english / french and a new language will emerge over time.
I find it funny. In my small country, progressives prefer the English language and borrowing customs from the West because they think maintaining our own identity, our customs, our local food, our traditions, our culture, our language and our identity as people is something "conservative", "subversive" and "reactionary".
Meanwhile, progressives in English speaking countries think the contrary is true.
Progressives hate what they have, so they want to change things. Unfortunately, they never seem too concerned whether the changes improve the overall situation or not. Conservatives love what they have or had, so they want to keep things as they are or go back to the way things were. Unfortunately, they too aren't looking at the overall situation.
It seems both camps are emotionally attached to their positions not being capable of considering that they are wrong about something. To err is human and so it is to think to be always correct in the important matters, I guess.
The rules of linguistic evolution apply just as much online as they do face to face. The complexity and uniqueness of a language is inversely proportional to how much contact its speakers have with non-speakers, especially ones learning the language as adults. Some contact starts to grind the sharp edges off, like losing clicks. More contact begins morphing the grammar, such as changing order from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object. Eventually they blend together, or if their populations are too uneven, one is absorbed.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Do you wall yourself off to keep foreign language from overly influencing you or do you give up a part of yourself to join the conversation?
Anecdotally, the working class people I've talked to care a lot more about the opportunities they get from learning English than they do about preserving the legacy of their language.
M. Á. Oxlaj Kumez: I have no sympathy for you. You play the victim and complain ceaselessly to foreign journalists. Be the change you want to see in the world!
Let's imagine a different universe where the interviewee can proudly recount his achievements:
• Added a megabyte of Kaqchikel text content on the Web.
• Contributed a 1st party Kaqchikel keyboard layout to Xkb and a 3rd party layout to Android and Windows.
• Published a free to use Kaqchikel dictionary and spell checker.
• Worked with the Linux user groups in the four biggest cities to add a Kaqchikel locale pack to KDE, and spin a variant of an existing popular distro that comes with Kaqchikel out of the box.
• Distributed ten thousand kits to convert Mesoamerican Spanish keyboards into Kaqchikel.
• Found like-minded individuals and raised funds and coordinated efforts through the Kaqchikel resource centre at the university in Guatemala City.
• Lobbied the government to give indigenous languages equal status under the law.
None of this is particularly technically challenging: Kaqchikel is written in Latin.
sorry, but pointing at a problem is the right way to go. You are basically angry he is not a technologist. but that's more your problem than his problem.
Also: "Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser."
So, he tries to do whatever he can. And perhaps he has also a life and a real job.
I didn't know him and i have no axe to grind. i just find you reaction very weird and overly aggressive.
> You are basically angry […] i just find you reaction very weird and overly aggressive.
False, you chose to interpret my post that way.
> not a technologist
This is relevant to two points out of seven, both of which he could just delegate and oversee.
I am disappointed in the substandard level of discourse you bring into this thread. The site rules prevent me from speaking my mind any further, so I'm out of here.
I like that the article present two different points. One is that the Internet is a reflection of the socioeconomic reality of the world. Languages with less, or just poorer speakers are less represented. The lack of representation causes a feedback loop that also makes access information harder for poorer communities. Being aware of this reality helps us to understand the challenges that less connected societies have to work with.
The other important point, is to look forward on how the Internet can help to preserve languages for future generations. We are in an unique place were we can save human culture for future generations to study.
I know the feeling from my travels thru China. I was able to access Internet, but the language barrier was always present. It was an interesting experience to see how many non-English speakers experience the Internet.
Obviously I'm not part of a real minority language but I've tried to use my software in English over German for many years just because it's a lot easier to search for error messages.
OK, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but some real reasons (if you understand the language well enough) is that English is usually the original and so the localization can be ok or bad, but it's usually not better than the original. And as I said, this is German and not some language spoken by just a few people.
That said, I'd love to know more about the generic impression of how well localization works for Spanish or Russian, languages with a lot more speakers. I suppose with UTF-8 it's at least only a few mojibake errors and not total mayhem like in the ASCII times...
And no, I'm not arguing other languages should not be on the internet but for technical stuff (and news) I somehow really prefer English, maybe it's because I've been hanging around online and in chatrooms in English for too many decades.
I've been doing the exact same with French for the past few years : you manage to find a lot of decent quality stuff in French overall, but as soon as you need to look up GitHub issues or stack overflow answers, using French is a clear issue.
Interestingly enough, while using the Internet, learning English came naturally, but I don't really see a point of learning other languages. I wonder why that is.
Maybe the benefits are just too deeply hidden or there aren't enough benefits. Possibly there is a bias in search engines that enables the hiding of resources in other languages. (While they are quite persistent to offer me results in the language of the country I'm residing in, despite doing all my searches in English.)
Maybe my view is skewed by the fact (well, I think it is so) that I learn languages a lot faster by speaking or surrounding myself with them. Studying at home simply does not work for me. I love languages, but I'd prefer to be fluent before using them for important stuff.
46 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 90.7 ms ] threadOur work isn't listed on any of these pages about which indigenous languages are on the internet because we don't want it to be, these pages are for tribal citizen use only. So, there may be a lot more written languages in use somehow than the author believes. But who knows.
There is a lot of internet interaction that happens privately/semi-privately in chat applications like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, etc.
From my limited personal experience, communities who speak and are able to write in minority languages continue to do so in their communication via these apps even though they may have a small appearance on public websites. Of course, for communities that do no have a written form for their language or very few know it, then this is less likely the case.
It's very easy for native English speakers to say English should be the only language because it has only upsides for them, and they need not give up anything, and they have never been coerced into using it. Whereas I suspect 99% of people who say things like "we don't need UTF-8, the world can be ASCII-only" would go absolutely bananas if they woke up tomorrow and found that HN was now a mandatory-Mandarin forum.
Some minority languages were actively suppressed during the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was part of the point of the "residential schools" system of Canada, Australia and elsewhere: take children away from their parents and beat their language out of them.
A few languages have managed to go from repressed to national language status: Irish, Hebrew, probably others.
I don't see how me writing a tech article in English or my own language means abandoning others "culture, literature (not necessarily written!)".
Am I required to learn 7000 languages?
It's also very easy to assume that everyone advocating for using a common language is a native English speaker.
Irish has had "national language" status for 100 years, during which time it has continued to decline. Strong government support for the language - making it a requirement for government jobs, teaching it to schoolchildren, defining regions of the country where Irish should be the primary everyday language - weren't enough to prevent the continued decline of the language.
I think the problem with the sort of language policy that Ireland pursued is that language is a practical tool for most people. A lot of people liked the idea of Irish coming back (especially back when speaking Irish was a political statement against English colonialism), but in everyday life in Ireland, English is vastly more useful. The last monolingual Irish speaker died in 1998.[1] You will never encounter anyone who only knows how to speak Irish. Back when there were monolingual Irish speakers, they lived in some of the poorest areas of Ireland and hoped that their children would learn English, so that they would have better opportunities.
In some ways, the language policy backfired. Some people actually viewed it as oppressive, because they didn't see the point of learning a language that was of no practical use to them in everyday life, and they weren't able to get certain jobs unless they spoke that language.
There's a funny TV series that explores how useful the Irish language is in everyday life, which aired on Ireland's Irish-language station.[2] The host tries to go through his life using only Irish. Most of the Irish people he encounters have the proficiency of your average adult who took a foreign language many years ago in school and never used it again. A few people can speak it well. Many more are confused. But it's sobering to watch it and think about what it would actually take to revive Irish as the primary language of communication in Ireland, or why you would want to do so.
With Irish, there's also the peculiarity that it's not really the language of Irish culture. Ireland is world-famous for its English-language literature.
1. Seán Ó hEinirí: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_%C3%93_hEinir%C3%AD
2. No Béarla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk
Check jw.org, it's in 1017 languages !
When I am addressing to an international audience, I am writing in (poor) English because it is the lingua franca of the world now, pretty much like latin was 1000 years ago.
One of the characteristics I love about English the most is the wanton, shameless adoption of not just words but entire phrases into the lexicon. 'Frankish Tongue', nah lingua franca it is. 'long time no see' is another favorite example. Ungrammatical in English, direct word-for-word translation from Mandarin? Sure, come on in, the water's fine. No one bats an eye.
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften
[1] https://www.vandale.nl/nieuwewoorden/2015
Meanwhile, progressives in English speaking countries think the contrary is true.
It seems both camps are emotionally attached to their positions not being capable of considering that they are wrong about something. To err is human and so it is to think to be always correct in the important matters, I guess.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Do you wall yourself off to keep foreign language from overly influencing you or do you give up a part of yourself to join the conversation?
Anecdotally, the working class people I've talked to care a lot more about the opportunities they get from learning English than they do about preserving the legacy of their language.
Let's imagine a different universe where the interviewee can proudly recount his achievements:
• Added a megabyte of Kaqchikel text content on the Web.
• Contributed a 1st party Kaqchikel keyboard layout to Xkb and a 3rd party layout to Android and Windows.
• Published a free to use Kaqchikel dictionary and spell checker.
• Worked with the Linux user groups in the four biggest cities to add a Kaqchikel locale pack to KDE, and spin a variant of an existing popular distro that comes with Kaqchikel out of the box.
• Distributed ten thousand kits to convert Mesoamerican Spanish keyboards into Kaqchikel.
• Found like-minded individuals and raised funds and coordinated efforts through the Kaqchikel resource centre at the university in Guatemala City.
• Lobbied the government to give indigenous languages equal status under the law.
None of this is particularly technically challenging: Kaqchikel is written in Latin.
Also: "Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser."
So, he tries to do whatever he can. And perhaps he has also a life and a real job.
I didn't know him and i have no axe to grind. i just find you reaction very weird and overly aggressive.
False, you chose to interpret my post that way.
> not a technologist
This is relevant to two points out of seven, both of which he could just delegate and oversee.
I am disappointed in the substandard level of discourse you bring into this thread. The site rules prevent me from speaking my mind any further, so I'm out of here.
The other important point, is to look forward on how the Internet can help to preserve languages for future generations. We are in an unique place were we can save human culture for future generations to study.
I know the feeling from my travels thru China. I was able to access Internet, but the language barrier was always present. It was an interesting experience to see how many non-English speakers experience the Internet.
OK, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but some real reasons (if you understand the language well enough) is that English is usually the original and so the localization can be ok or bad, but it's usually not better than the original. And as I said, this is German and not some language spoken by just a few people.
That said, I'd love to know more about the generic impression of how well localization works for Spanish or Russian, languages with a lot more speakers. I suppose with UTF-8 it's at least only a few mojibake errors and not total mayhem like in the ASCII times...
And no, I'm not arguing other languages should not be on the internet but for technical stuff (and news) I somehow really prefer English, maybe it's because I've been hanging around online and in chatrooms in English for too many decades.
Maybe the benefits are just too deeply hidden or there aren't enough benefits. Possibly there is a bias in search engines that enables the hiding of resources in other languages. (While they are quite persistent to offer me results in the language of the country I'm residing in, despite doing all my searches in English.)
For those not in the know, mojibake is when text looks like garbage, usually due to text encoding errors.