The Many Languages Missing From the Internet

guest · Apr 21, 2020

The Many Languages Missing From the Internet
English and a handful of other languages dominate the internet, but this is leaving indigenous cultures without a voice online
April 15, 2020
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200414-the-many-lanuages-still-missing-from-the-internet

Imagine your favourite social media platform does not let you post in English. Now think of a keyboard that won’t allow you to type in your own words. You would have two options: either switch to another language or remain digitally silent.
This is the reality for most people that speak indigenous languages and dialects.

There are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world, yet only 7% are reflected in published online material, according to Whose knowledge?, a campaign that aims to make visible the knowledge of marginalised communities online.

While Facebook supports up to 111 languages, making it the most multilingual online platform, a survey published by Unesco in 2008 found that 98% of the internet’s web pages are published in just 12 languages, and more than half of them are in English. This reduces linguistic diversity online to a handful of tongues, making it harder for those that speak one of the excluded languages of the internet.
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“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and hence a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages,” he says. “So what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language.”
His dream is to be able to have a “digital life in my own language, and when I decide to move to another language that it will be my decision”.

He is not the only one with that dream. In 2003, Unesco adopted a recommendation to promote the use of multilingualism online. Ever since, the organisation has been pushing for universality on the internet, with a special focus on indigenous languages.

Take Wikipedia, for example, where more than 80% of articles come from Europe and North America. A similar thing happens with 75% of the web’s top-level domains, from .com to .org, which come from the same two regions.

“There are several difficulties, and the technical is just one of them,” explains Oxlaj Kumez.
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There are different levels to this linguistic divide. From hardware like keyboards to programming languages, from website domains to applications and social media platforms, the lack of diverse alphabets is the first gap of many that prevents almost all the indigenous languages being part of the online conversation.
For Victoria Aguilar, the main problem is that societies are now dragging the same structural social inequalities found offline to the internet.
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