[Air-l] Language on the Internet (was AoIR in Latin-America)

[Cunliffe D J (Comp)]

Hi All,

Joshua Raclaw wrote: "Are you suggesting that a spoken minority language
might actually become endangered because it doesn't have an online
presence?  A vast majority of these minority languages don't even have a
writing system."

This is a subject of great interest to me, I would have responded
earlier but I have been busy and rather ill.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive evidence regarding
the relationship between online presence and language death. However the
assumption of a relationship is quite commonly held, though the nature
of the relationship isn't always agreed upon:

"The circumstances that have led to the present language mortality...
[include]...electronic media bombardment, especially television, an
incalculably lethal new weapon (which I have called 'cultural nerve
gas')" Krauss, 1992, p6.

"An endangered language will progress if its speakers can make use of
electronic technology" Crystal, 2000, p141.

However, it is important to recognise that all minority languages are
not in the same boat. I totally agree that for some minority languages
the Internet is totally irrelevant, but then for some so probably is
printing. However for the larger minority languages, it seems to me that
the lack of a presence could indeed be argued to be contributing to a
languages decline. Take Welsh as an example, approximately 800,000
people with some language skill, good levels of education, high levels
of exposure to computers in schools and in the home, reasonable levels
of wealth. If Welsh is to be perceived as a modern living language, then
surely it must have a presence on the Internet (as in fact it does).
Much of the argument is not so much about new opportunities to use the
language, but more to do with status, prestige and relevance to the
modern world (see for example Eisenlohr, 2004). How could you convince a
child going through Welsh medium education that their language was
relevant if they never saw it on the Internet?

The Catalans have recently gone so far as to establish a new top level
Internet domain for their language/culture, so clearly they think it is
of relevance to their language (Gerrand, 2006). 

Each minority language exists in a unique context, any generalisations
about what will or won't be beneficial are doomed to look absurd for
specific languages.

Of course an interesting aside on this is to wonder what will happen to
those languages that have a large real world speaker base but only have
minimal presence online. Are you going to see a decline in these
languages, or will we have some languages that are minority languages
online but not offline?

I am very happy to talk about these issues whether here on the list or
off-list, so please don't be shy :-)

Daniel.

Daniel Cunliffe
School of Computing, university of Glamorgan.
www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~Daniel.Cunliffe/

D. Crystal, Language Death, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Eisenlohr, P. (2004) Language revitalization and new technologies:
cultures of electronic mediation and the refiguring of communities.
Annual review of Anthropology, 33, 21-45.

Gerrand, P. (2006) Cultural diversity in cyberspace: the Catalan
campaign to win the new .cat top level domain. First Monday 11 (1).
Online document:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_1/gerrand/index.html  

M. Krauss, "The world's languages in crisis", Language, 68 (1), pp.
4-10, 1992.