Indigenous Languages
Arle Lommel, Senior Analyst, CSA Research.
Simon Hodgkins, Editor in Chief, VTQ Magazine.
The rich tapestry of global cultural diversity
In 2016, we had learned that 40 percent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing. Helping to promote and protect indigenous languages and improve the lives of those who speak them had been a significant focus in 2019.
Indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages, and traditions.
The celebration of indigenous languages aimed to strengthen and reinforce the many standard-setting tools adopted by the international community, which includes specific provisions to promote and protect languages. Speaking with Arle Lommel, Senior Analyst at CSA Research, we revisit this essential topic.
The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages and requested the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to serve as the lead organization.
What had you observed throughout the year?
I ran across people relating to it in their discussions. Although sometimes it felt a bit like preaching to the choir, it is a fantastic opportunity in education. It has been beneficial, but there is a lot more room to make people aware of language and the role that it plays.
It is that we’re talking to the primary audience that understands this problem, or do you think
in hindsight that it should have been more?
I believe in educational or other environments where people are open to it, it is a fantastic
opportunity. However, the real benefit may not be this year or next year: it maybe ten years down the road when some of the people who’ve been exposed to the declaration are out there making their own decisions in the corporate world.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a significant milestone. But it will not succeed without the support of people everywhere. What are your thoughts on this?
One thing that is encouraging me is that we’ve been tracking the online use of languages for
several years. Each year the number of languages with a real online presence. We’ve also observed
a slow but steady expansion in the number of languages that play a significant economic role on the web, including fast risers such as Hindi and Indonesian, in particular. Moving languages to the digital realm are essential for their long-term viability.
What impact does our increasingly digital world have on indigenous languages?
I heard a while ago that the fastest growing language in the US is Lugo, an Indian language. And Guarani in Bolivia has actually been gaining ground on Spanish in parts of South America. Economic changes and the expansion of the long tail are factors that enterprises need to address.
If you look at companies like Google or Facebook, it is in their interest to reach out because these people want to be full participants in the digital economy. Here is a case where the capitalist desire to find customers can actually help support language as a human right. Increasingly, people are no longer content to use a colonial language when they would prefer to use the language of their homes. These languages may not represent as big an opportunity as German or other “big” languages, but there’s an opportunity for the companies that know how to speak to people in their languages and can see them as customers.
It is no longer the official International Year of Indigenous Languages, however a number of very real risks are continuing to confront indigenous languages, what continued activities can we focus on to help improve
both their chances of survival and the lives of those who speak them?
The collateral and educational materials developed for the International Year of Indigenous Languages will continue to be valuable. The message they send, of course, isn’t tied to the year. It is essential to continue to promote the message. Companies can also contribute to language revitalization and preservation efforts. Many of the digitization activities receive support enterprises and from public institutions.
Is the digital divide a factor here?
Even larger language communities may have trouble getting their language digitized. Of course, a community with only 1,000 speakers will struggle, but we also see ones with tens of millions of speakers that receive little investment. One major challenge we have covered in our research is that so much computing now relies on access to increasingly large amounts of linguistic data to drive artificial intelligence applications, but these resources simply don’t exist for the vast majority of languages. This shift actually increases the “linguistic digital divide”: if you speak Chinese, English, French, German, or Spanish
you can take advantage of AI-driven services, but if you speak Swedish or Swahili, you won’t have the
same options. In terms of basic enabling technologies, organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Unicode Consortium, and browser developers like Mozilla are doing a tremendous amount of work to improve the experience across languages.
Many of the large corporations such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft have also put a lot of effort into increasing support. For example, Microsoft has worked closely with the Cherokee Nation in the U.S. to build word processing capabilities for their unique alphabet. If you can get the right expert in touch with companies to say, “here’s what we need,” it often isn’t a huge investment to add support. So communities can point to the Year of Indigenous Languages and the materials that accompany it to lobby the foundations associated with large companies for resources to include their languages in digitization efforts.
What about worldwide projects carried out by Translation Commons*?
Translation Commons is a great effort to democratize language information and resources. It works to share the information so that, with community commitment and organization, even languages with no current speakers can be revived. This involves many of the resources needed for language documentation,
but also teaching materials, teachers to use them, and a strong effort by the community to maintain the effort over many years, perhaps decades.
There are some great examples where this approach has succeeded. For example, the move in New Zealand to revitalize the Māori language, also known as Te Reo, was based in part on the approach taken in Wales to revitalizing Welsh. It involved indigenous language broadcast media, nest schools, and other resources to give the language a community role beyond just what people speak around the kitchen table. A similar approach has also been taken with Irish.
Other examples of the many projects worldwide include:
• Hebrew: This is the most successful revitalization effort, in which a language that had been in use
solely as a liturgical language for over a thousand years was brought back and made into a living
language today used by about nine million people. The large gap in daily use made this particularly
challenging because so many modern concepts didn’t exist in the language at all prior to its
revitalization.
• Cherokee: Communities and governments are dedicating efforts from immersion schools for
children, continuing education through elementary and high school, and adult training. Although there are only a few thousand native speakers left, the Cherokee Nation has really come together to support the language as a key part of its heritage.
• Mutsun: The Amah Mutsun tribe in California has a language revitalization program for their language, the last native speaker of which died in 1930.
• Chakma: A language of Bangladesh and eastern India with approximately 600,000 speakers, it has never had official recognition in any country, but activist efforts have led to revival of its historical script for education in it in the Indian state of Tripura as well as literacy throughout the areas where it is spoken.
• Tunica: the ancestral language of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe in the Mississippi Valley in the U.S. state of Louisiana became dormant in 1948 and has since been reawakened by heritage speakers training new fluent speakers and encouraging others to enrol in immersion courses. This effort uses webinars and other digital means to reach out to tribal members who are not close enough for in-person education.
What these and other efforts show is that modern technology can benefit communication and serve as a vehicle to help historically neglected – or even suppressed – languages to gain the critical mass they need to succeed.
Even if most of these languages will never see the investment that major world tongues receive, even modest support can make a difference for their speakers and the cultures they represent.
About Arle Lommel
Arle Lommel is a Senior Analyst at CSA Research and a recognized expert in the fields of localization and translation. Widely published in the field, he focuses on both the technical and business aspects of the industry and how they relate to each other. As director of standards at LISA, he was responsible for the submission of the TBX standard to ISO (now ISO 30042) and driving standards development at LISA.
Arle holds a Ph.D. in Folkloristics and is trained as a linguist. He has worked extensively in the fields of ethnography, organology, and semiotics. He has led the development of a visual identity and exhibit materials for Traditional Arts Indiana, a state-recognized folk arts agency in Indiana.
His specialties include standards development, translation technology, translation and localization business, ethnographic research, and linguistics.
About Common Sense Advisory Research
Since 2002, CSA Research (formerly known as Common Sense Advisory) has been providing unparalleled independent, objective, and comprehensive primary research focused exclusively on the global content and language services markets. Our mission is to provide clients with verified and validated research-based deliverables to help them make smarter decisions and succeed in their globalization initiatives.
Our proprietary methodologies, data, insights, events, advisory, consulting, and leadership programs provide clients with the international perspective companies must have to thrive in a complex global world.
*Translation Commons excerpt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Translation Commons is a non-profit under Section 501 (c) (3) and further classified as a public charity under Section 170 (b) (1) (A) (vi), EIN 47-3068747.