Introducing DigiGlot, a newsletter about languages and tech · Global Voices
<PERSON> and his late father <PERSON> digitally record words in the Yanesha language of Peru during a workshop organized by the Living Tongues Institute. Photo by <PERSON> and used with permission.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of DigiGlot, a bi-weekly collaborative newsletter that reports on how indigenous, minority, and endangered language communities are adopting and adapting technology to increase the digital presence of their languages, and in the process changing the internet landscape by increasing linguistic diversity online. This collaborative publication will be compiled by a team of volunteers. The contributors will be listed at the bottom of each issue.
As this is our first issue, we expect that the format and the content of DigiGlot will evolve over the next few months. We’re always looking for reader feedback as well as suggestions for items to be included in future editions. You can get in touch with us through the Rising Voices contact page.
Contents
* 1 Tech and digital activism on the roster for the International Year of Indigenous Languages
* 2 Are “extended” Latin characters slowing the growth of African Wikipedias?
* 3 Wikipedia's Universal Language Selector adds three West African languages
* 4 Modernizing Hawaiian-language text with the push of a button
* 5 Will Siri and Alexa speak Welsh someday?
* 6 Voice recognition technologies help to document the Seneca language
* 7 Upcoming Events & Opportunities
Tech and digital activism on the roster for the International Year of Indigenous Languages
With the arrival of 2019, the International Year of Indigenous Languages is officially underway. Back in December 2016, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2019 the year for an awareness campaign coordinated by UNESCO and focusing on five areas, including capacity building and increasing international cooperation. A consortium of language-related organizations is being formed to highlight the campaign on social media using the hashtag #IYIL2019. As an additional component of the campaign, UNESCO announced a call for research papers, with one of the key topic areas being “Technology, digital activism, and artificial intelligence (e.g. language technology).”
Are “extended” Latin characters slowing the growth of African Wikipedias?
One of the immediate legacies of European colonialism in present-day Africa is a disjointed patchwork of writing systems for local languages. 507
While many African languages have been written using the Latin alphabet for several decades, languages have varied greatly in their use of special and accented letters, or the “extended” Latin characters. Some languages were even written differently on either side of national borders. In this series of essays [parts 1, 2, 3], <PERSON> reflects on four decades of African language standardization and explains how early decisions about orthography may have consequences for digital media production today.
<PERSON> suggests that the challenge presented by using extended Latin orthographies—those that force users to work their way through unstandardized input interfaces to type the “special” characters in their language—may be limiting the development of some African Wikipedias. His analysis finds that African Wikipedias “written in extended and complex Latin hav[e] on average about a third the number of articles” as those Wikipedias written in a simpler Latin alphabet. While <PERSON> acknowledges that his analysis is preliminary, his observations usefully highlight some of the complexities of building digital ecologies in local languages.
Wikipedia's Universal Language Selector adds three West African languages
<PERSON> is a Nigerian Wikipedian and coordinator of the Wikimedia Hub in Ibadan, Nigeria. He organizes and mobilizes activities and campaigns such as the recent AfroCine project. Working on Wikipedia, <PERSON> noticed that both new and experienced editors were having trouble typing the necessary diacritical marks in Wikipedia articles for national languages such as Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo.
While there are special keyboards such as the Yoruba Name keyboards for Mac and Windows and other virtual keyboards that allow users to display these special characters, they require some degree of technical knowledge to install and utilize. <PERSON> envisioned a solution built into Wikipedia itself. He put in a request on the Wikimedia Community Wishlist to have Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo incorporated into the Universal Language Selector (ULS), a facility available for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to “allow users to type text in different languages not directly supported by their keyboard, read content in a script for which fonts are not available locally, or customize the language in which menus are displayed.” The request was granted and the Wikimedia Foundation Language Team included the three West African languages in the ULS. Now Wikipedia editors using a desktop or laptop computer can incorporate the special characters into their texts by typing the tilde (~) character before the corresponding letter. 112