Earlier this winter I posted about the development of online communities for Alaska Native languages, especially Facebook communities. Language revitalization programs have come and gone in Alaska over the past 40 years, with varying levels of success. In all of these efforts one of the main challenges has been to find a domain in which to use the language. That's where digital technologies have the greatest potential. Seemingly out of nowhere, new digital technologies such as Facebook have emerged as an important domains of language use for Alaska Native language.
Is this a good thing? Though some might disagree, I think this is a very good development. It brings Native languages into the modern world. The digitally interconnected world in which we live today
is not likely to go away. If we insist on leaving Native languages out of this digital world, then those languages are almost certain to go the way of the typewriter.
A more difficult question is, will this be enough? That is, will making a digital space for Alaska Native languages be enough to sustain them into the future? A recent paper by András Kornai entitled Digital Language Death argues that languages need primary digital support in order to thrive in the new digital world. That is, we need to not only use Native language online but also to interact with technology in the language. By this measure Alaska Native languages are not doing so well. There is a lot of stuff about Native language online, but almost nothing in Native language.
We can use Wikipedia as a way to measure this. Since its founding in 2001 the collaborative internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has grown to become the default reference source for almost any question. Wikipedia is now arguably an essential component of digital existence. In 2014 there were Wikipedia versions in 289 different languages, plus another 340 at the “incubator” stage. This latter category represents an experimental development stage; content on incubator pages may not be entirely in the target languages, and pages may have very little content. As of December 2014 there were 26 Wikipedia sites for Native North American languages, most at the incubator stage. Only two Native North American languages had any significant Wikipedia presence: Navajo (ISO 639-3 nav) and Greenlandic (ISO 639-3 kal). Navajo had by far the largest Wikipedia presence with more than 2000 articles, many quite substantial. For comparison note that the English language Wikipedia site has more than 4.6 million entries. Most Native American Wikipedia sites lack significant content. For example, the Alabama (ISO 639-3 akz) incubator site consists entirely of pages devoted to towns in New England and Germany, each containing approximately 30 words of text. The content of each page is essentially identical with the exception of the place names. These pages were ostensibly machine-generated and do not reflect an active Wikipedia community. In the counts of Wikipedia article below I include only non-trivial articles.
 |
| Number of (non-trivial) Wikipedia articles (official and incubator) in Native North American languages |
Of course there is plenty of information about Native languages on the regular (English) Wikipedia. Entering yugtun as a search term in the English Wikipedia brings up an article on the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language. But this is an article about Yup'ik written in English. Although it contains a number of Yup'ik words, it's clearly not the same as a Wikipedia article written in Yup'ik. The difference can be compared to the difference between a bilingual dictionary and a monolingual dictionary. A bilingual dictionary of Yup'ik is written in English about Yup'ik. But a monolingual Yup'ik dictionary is both in and about Yup'ik language and allows one to look up definitions of Yup'ik words written in Yup'ik
Does this matter? Can't we just keep using Wikipedia in English while doing other things in Native language? In theory this should be possible. In practice this might be difficult. We will always be able to access information about Yup'ik in English, but that is the museum model. For Yup'ik to remain digitally viable there need to be ways to use Yup'ik language as the medium to discover information. That is essentially Kornai's claim in the Digital Language Death paper. He doesn't argue that all information about Yup'ik will disappear. Rather, he says that if we don't provide digital support to actually use the language as a medium for interacting online, then the language will become a museum object. A curiosity to be Googled and read about on (English) Wikipedia.
One of the greatest barriers to ensuring a digital future for Alaska Native languages is that much of the required digital infrastructure is mundane and boring. We don't just need Native language Wikipedias; we also need more basic tools like spellcheckers, voice recognition, keyboards, and operating systems. I can interact with my smartphone in many languages, but none of them Alaska Native languages. In fact, only a handful of Native American languages have operating system support. Mac OS currently (version 10.10 Yosemite) offers partial support for Cherokee, Inuktitut, Hawaiian, Greenlandic, and Lakota. Microsoft Windows offered its first support for Native American languages with the Cherokee language pack for Windows 8, introduced in 2012. Support for mobile operating systems iOS and Android does not yet exist.
It's easy to overlook this basic level of functionality or to dismiss it as irrelevant. Some might claim that it doesn't matter what language we use to interact with our digital devices. I might be willing to agree if we lived in a state of full bilingualism. But that's not the case in Alaska. Native languages survive at the margins, taking a back seat to English. As we continue to be enveloped in a digital world, the language we use to interact with that world will only strengthen. If we continue to use English as the medium for interacting with the digital world then English will continue to dominate, and Native languages will disappear into the background. That is digital language death.
No comments:
Post a Comment