Thank you for joining New Tactics, Rising Voices, Indigenous Tweets, and other practitioners for an online dialogue. It is on Using Citizen Media Tools to Promote Under-Represented Languages*. The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) regularly publishes an Atlas documenting. Mapping more than 2,500 global languages that are classified as vulnerable, endangered, or extinct. UNESCO also estimates that of the 6,000 current languages spoken today. More than half will be extinct by the start of the next century. Adding that “with the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity will lose not only a cultural wealth, but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages.”

Urgent Intervention Needed for Under-Represented Languages

These languages require urgent intervention.  In many remote locations, only a handful of speakers remain.  Many languages remain vulnerable due to the pressures of globalization.  At the same time, there is also a growing movement emerging where members of these communities are increasingly recognizing the great value in maintaining their native language despite internal and external pressures. Through the use of participatory citizen media and web 2.0 tools,. These individuals are building communities around the common use of these under-represented languages. 

Projects like Indigenous Tweets and Blogs have been mapping users of an active indigenous language. Making it easier to find one another and encouraging the work that they are doing.  But there are challenges – the digital divide impacts many of these communities and keyboards in minority languages are often unavailable.  In some cases, there are also cultural barriers in the use of indigenous languages in a public setting.  Despite these challenges, there are many examples of innovative approaches to preserving and promoting these languages through citizen media and web 2.0 tools.  Young leaders and “bridge” figures (often referred to individuals that can bridge two different cultures). They are building a movement around the use, preservation and promotion of these languages in an online context.

*Under-represented languages include all those that are used infrequently in the context of computing and new media.  Many of these have small speaker populations and are endangered to one degree or another. Others have strong speaking communities but face digital divide issues in trying to use their language online.

Challenges of Language Representation online

A language may be underrepresented online if its speakers have difficulties in accessing the internet, especially if older generations, who have mastered the language and different scripts, lack ICT knowledge. There may also be a lack of deliberate effort by younger generations to develop an online presence in the language. Additionally, speakers of lesser-known languages may feel a sense of guilt about excluding non-speakers from the conversation. This creates the need for a “tipping point”—a point where people feel comfortable enough to let their language exist in a real or virtual space.

At the same time, people who speak other languages may feel motivated to learn that language. The reason the first blogs were written primarily in English was to ensure they reached a wide audience. While this trend has been changing, interventions are still needed to provide in-depth news and create online content that is both relevant and entertaining in underrepresented languages. Engaging groups based on shared interests can also be a good source of language revitalization.

Solutions and Strategies for Language Revitalization

Language shifts, where a majority favors one dominant language, can lead to the underrepresentation of other languages online. To prevent this, schools should immerse children in their native languages, offer degrees in those languages, and provide official documents in them. Online tools for some languages face challenges, such as a lack of technical terms and dialect standardization. Neologisms, borrowed from other languages, can help if they reflect the community’s views. Initiatives like the African Network for Localization and the Irish Terminology Board work to provide translations and create new terms. However, translations by multilingual localizers can sometimes push the target language toward the source language (e.g., English).

4o mini Funding remains a significant obstacle in increasing the online presence of underrepresented languages. Volunteerism helps localize software and social media, but finding dedicated individuals can be challenging. Nevertheless, it may be the most sustainable approach to increasing the online presence of these languages.

Technical Barriers and Solutions for Language Representation

For many languages, specific technical barriers exist, such as orthography, lack of technical translations, and no standard writing system in predominantly oral societies. There is also a mental block among teenagers who think there aren’t other users online willing to respond. Older generations who have little interest in the internet. Solutions for languages with different scripts include remapping keyboard keys, mapping syllabary characters to keystrokes. And developing mobile texting menus for devices like iPhones and iPads.

For underrepresented languages, especially in Africa, it is crucial to translate applications and platforms into these languages. However, finding volunteers to do this is difficult. Unicode is essential for using a language with technology; if the character set isn’t represented in Unicode, issues arise with email and web posting. Localizers may also face challenges with “codes” and “locales,” as dialects may have different codes, making it hard for users to interact online. To address these issues, technology should be localized to as many languages as possible, independent of specific language needs. Programs like Skype demonstrate that computers no longer need to be text-based, and simple, non-text-dependent applications could be developed to archive spoken words online, just as with written text.

Grassroots Efforts and the Role of Mobile Technology

To revitalize a language or bring it online, it requires people to start working on it themselves, without waiting for permission or policy changes. Creating Wikipedia pages is an easy and effective way to increase a language’s presence. However, the issue of large portions of the population lacking internet access must be addressed. Open-source mobile platforms like FrontlineSMS and Freedom Fone can play an important role by leveraging text-to-audio elements, which over 90% of the world’s population uses, to bridge literacy and language barriers.

Shared stories

Dispersed communities, such as the Nishnaabe around the colonial Canada-USA border, have shown a discomfort in speaking their language because of previous subjugation, lack of job opportunities using the language, and other reasons. The elderly, who make up most of the first-speakers, reject ICT which further limits its spread. Attempts to address these challenges and heal the communities have included working with community members who are creative artists to advocate for healthy and culturally-appropriate ICT-based approaches to language revitalization. Another tactic has involved language games for the radio where listeners call in or send text messages to submit answers.

In Australia, an Indigenous-led podcast aired on local stations, reminding audiences of the uniqueness of Indigenous Australians. Radio, still a powerful medium, can supplement online access with local programs to reach wider audiences. It’s important to accept any achievement as progress, especially when fluent speakers are scarce for web interactivity. The web offers cost-effective ways to show that a language exists, grows, and attracts a new audience. Facebook promotes correct language use, encourages dialogue, and helps create new words for modern ideas and materials.The challenge here remains to get writers to use the language’s orthography correctly.

While for many African languages it is an uphill battle to get people to participate online, examples from the Welsh can easily be followed – examples include a tweet aggregator that serves as a gateway to finding Welsh twitter users and giving the trending topics of the hour/day/week, or language blogs and podcast lists that give links to all blogs in that language.

What is important is that younger and older generations understand each other, and are open to accepting both the traditional and ways of speaking and communication, including the use of more modern technology such as the internet.

How do you build an online community committed to building this language online?

With under-represented languages that are still spoken by younger generations, citizen media tools are more readily used. When technical terms are lacking, they are easily adopted from another, more widespread language. While issues do arise around the standardization of technical terminology and monitoring of members’ demographics, the benefits of an online communities can also extend to off-line events and advertising within that community based on similar interests. Such in-person meet-ups can reinforce relationships and make it easier to work together online. It is also important to remember that it is not just minority languages that are underrepresented online. In the Philippines, the enforcement of Tagalog as the official language resulted in its dominance on cyberspace too, making it crucial for non-Tagalogs to make a deliberate effort to use and preserve their language both on and offline.

All over the world, social networks allow people to self-organize and affiliate in online communities that eliminate much administrative work. Facebook allows interface translation through volunteers and votes, enabling users to interact in their own language. However, many languages aren’t available for translation on Facebook, and there’s no plan to add new languages soon. Other social networks and blogs are growing, with volunteer translators and communities working to add new languages online.

Language and Software Outreach in Education

Children love to be represented in all different kinds of media, and with just basic skills and knowledge, they are usually only limited by their own creativity. Outreach, thus, needs to be in schools where the biggest changes are needed to get the next generation to use what’s out there in their own language. Once people start using software in one language, they will always use it in that language. Therefore, these patterns of use need to be established early. The development and promotion of national languages in the use of software can be replicated from the Malian education system, where almost 11 national languages, or mother tongues, are taught to first language speakers at school, and only later are other languages introduced.

Language, Attitudes, and the Role of Parents and Teachers

It is important to factor in the attitudes of parents and teachers in the way the younger generation relates to their own language. Adults often have a specific vision of what their young people will grow up to be. What they “happen” to speak at home is one thing, while the language(s) that open doors to colleges, conference rooms, offices, and boardrooms are another. The next generation needs to see its language in the tools and content that it interacts with.

Furthermore, organizations and programs that focus on health care or poverty alleviation could develop a strong language maintenance ideology and, in doing so, bring language maintenance back onto the agenda. This could happen in impoverished communities that have placed language maintenance low on their list of priorities. However, with the development of software in national languages, companies have yet to set up such initiatives in countries like Mali. And with limited teaching materials in their mother tongue. Resistance will remain until pedagogical shortcomings, as well as institutional and administrative insufficiencies, are addressed.