The Internet and Languages Part 3

The website of IATE (Inter-Active Terminology for Europe) was launched in March 2007 as an eagerly awaited free service on the web, with 1.4 million entries in 24 languages.

= Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym.

Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Doc.u.mentation License).

Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages in December 2004, 6 million articles in 250 languages in December 2006, and 7 million articles in 192 languages in May 2007, including 1.8 million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish. In August 2009, Wikipedia was among the top five websites in the world, with a total of 330 million visitors a month.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, founded in June 2003, which has run a number of other projects, beginning with Wiktionary (launched in December 2002) and Wikibooks (launched in June 2003), followed by Wikiquote, Wikisource (texts from public domain), Wikimedia Commons (multimedia), Wikispecies (animals and plants), Wikinews, Wikiversity (textbooks), and Wiki Search (search engine).

LEARNING LANGUAGES ONLINE

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Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote in September 1998: "As a language teacher, the web represents a plethora of new resources produced by the target culture, new tools for delivering lessons (interactive Java and Shockwave exercises) and testing, which are available to students any time they have the time or interest -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also an almost limitless publication outlet for my colleagues and I, not to mention my inst.i.tution. (...) Ultimately all course materials, including lecture notes, exercises, moot and credit testing, grading, and interactive exercises will be far more effective in conveying concepts that we have not even dreamed of yet."

= CTI Centre for Modern Languages

Since its inception in 1989, the CTI (Computer in Teaching Initiative) Centre for Modern Languages, based in the Language Inst.i.tute at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, aims to promote and encourage the use of computers in language learning and teaching. The CTI Centre provides information on how computer-a.s.sisted language learning (CALL) can be effectively integrated into existing courses. It offers support to language lecturers who are using computers in their teaching, or who wish to use them.

June Thompson, manager of the CTI Centre, wrote in December 1998: "The internet has the potential to increase the use of foreign languages, and our organization certainly opposed any trend towards the dominance of English as the language of the internet. The use of the internet has brought an enormous new dimension to our work of supporting language teachers in their use of technology in teaching."

How about the future? "I suspect that for some time to come, the use of internet-related activities for languages will continue to develop alongside other technology-related activities (e.g. use of CD-ROMs -- not all inst.i.tutions have enough networked hardware). In the future I can envisage use of internet playing a much larger part, but only if such activities are pedagogy-driven. Our organization is closely a.s.sociated with the WELL project which devotes itself to these issues."

The WELL (Web Enhanced Language Learning) project was a project from EUROCALL (European a.s.sociation for Computer-a.s.sisted Language Learning). It ran from 1997 to 2000 in the United Kingdom to provide access to high-quality web resources in 12 languages. The resources were selected and described by subject experts, with information and examples on how to use them for teaching and learning.

More generally, EUROCALL's goal is to promote the use of foreign languages within Europe, to provide a European focus for all aspects of the use of technology for language learning, and to enhance the quality, dissemination and efficiency of CALL materials. Another project of EUROCALL is CAPITAL (Computer-a.s.sisted p.r.o.nunciation Investigation Teaching and Learning), run by a group of researchers and pract.i.tioners interested in using computers in this field.

= LINGUIST List

The LINGUIST List was founded by Anthony Rodriques Aristar in 1990 at the University of Western Australia, with 60 subscribers, before moving from Australia to Texas A&M University in 1991. In 1997, emails sent to the distribution list were also available on the list's own website, in the following sections: the profession (conferences, linguistic a.s.sociations, programs), research and research support (papers, dissertation abstracts, projects, bibliographies, topics, texts), publications, pedagogy, language resources (languages, language families, dictionaries, regional information), and computer support (fonts and software). The LINGUIST List is a component of the WWW Virtual Library for linguistics.

Helen Dry, moderator of the LINGUIST List, wrote in August 1998: "The LINGUIST List, which I moderate, has a policy of posting in any language, since it's a list for linguists. However, we discourage posting the same message in several languages, simply because of the burden extra messages put on our editorial staff. (We are not a bounce- back list, but a moderated one. So each message is organized into an issue with like messages by our student editors before it is posted.) Our experience has been that almost everyone chooses to post in English. But we do link to a translation facility that will present our pages in any of five languages; so a subscriber need not read LINGUIST in English unless s/he wishes to. We also try to have at least one student editor who is genuinely multilingual, so that readers can correspond with us in languages other than English."

She added in July 1999: "We are beginning to collect some primary data.

For example, we have searchable databases of dissertation abstracts relevant to linguistics, of information on graduate and undergraduate linguistics programs, and of professional information about individual linguists. The dissertation abstracts collection is, to my knowledge, the only freely available electronic compilation in existence."

MINORITY LANGUAGES ON THE WEB

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Caoimhin o Donnaile has taught computing -- through the Gaelic language -- at the Inst.i.tute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic. He wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic -- the first software of this size available in Gaelic."

= The Ethnologue

Published by SIL International (SIL was initially known as the Summer Inst.i.tute of Linguistics), "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World" is an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world's 6,909 known living languages. The 16th edition was published in 2009, in print and on the web. The Ethnologue has been an active research project for more than fifty years. Thousands of linguists have contributed to the Ethnologue worldwide. A new edition is published approximately every four years.

The Ethnologue was founded in 1951 by Richard Pittman, who was motivated by the desire to share information on language development needs around the world with his colleagues at SIL International as well as with other language researchers. Richard Pittman was the editor of the 1st to 7th editions (1951-1969).

Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions (1971-2000).

She wrote in January 2000: "It is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps." In 1971, information was expanded from primarily minority languages to encompa.s.s all known languages of the world.

Between 1967 and 1973, she completed an in-depth revision of the information on Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and a few countries of Asia. During her years as editor, the number of identified languages grew from 4,493 to 6,809. The information recorded on each language expanded so that the published work more than tripled in size.

In 2000, Raymond Gordon Jr. became the third editor of the Ethnologue and produced the 15th edition (2005). Shortly after the publication of the 15th edition, Paul Lewis became the editor, responsible for general oversight and research policy. He installed Conrad Hurd as managing editor, responsible for operations and database management, and Raymond Gordon as senior research editor, leading a team of regional and language-family focused research editors.

In the Introduction of its latest edition (16th edition, 2009), the Ethnologue defines a language as such: "How one chooses to define a language depends on the purposes one has in identifying that language as distinct from another. Some base their definition on purely linguistic grounds. Others recognize that social, cultural, or political factors must also be taken into account. In addition, speakers themselves often have their own perspectives on what makes a particular language uniquely theirs. Those are frequently related to issues of heritage and ident.i.ty much more than to the linguistic features of the language(s) in question."

As explained in the Introduction, one feature of the database since its inception has been a system of three-letter language identifiers, that appeared in the publication itself from the 10th edition (1984) onwards. "In 1998, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted ISO 639-2, a standard for three-letter language identifiers. The standard is based on a convergence of ISO 639-1 (an earlier standard for two-letter language identifiers adopted in 1988) and of ANSI Z39.53 (also known as the MARC language codes, a set of three-letter identifiers developed within the library community and adopted as an American National Standard in 1987). The ISO 639-2 standard was insufficient for many purposes since it has identifiers for fewer than 400 individual languages. Thus in 2002, ISO TC37/SC2 formally invited SIL International to prepare a new standard that would reconcile the complete set of codes used in the Ethnologue with the codes already in use in the earlier ISO standard. In addition, codes developed by Linguist List to handle ancient and constructed languages were to be incorporated. The result, which was officially approved by the subscribing national standards bodies in 2006 and published in 2007, is a standard named ISO 639-3 that provides standardized three- letter codes for identifying nearly 7,500 languages (ISO 2007). SIL International was named as the registration authority for the ISO 639-3 standard inventory of language identifiers and administers the annual cycle for changes and updates. This edition of Ethnologue is the second to use the ISO 639-3 language identifiers. In the fifteenth edition they had the status of Draft International Standard. In this edition they are based on the standard as originally adopted plus the 2006 series of adopted change requests (released August 2007) and the 2007 series of adopted change requests (released January 2008). Information about the ISO 639-3 standard and procedures for requesting additions, deletions, and other modifications to the ISO 639-3 inventory of identified languages can be found at the ISO 639-3 website: http://www.sil.org/iso639-3."

= Experiences

Caoimhin o Donnaile has taught computing - through the Gaelic language - at the Inst.i.tute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, as well as the bilingual webpage European Minority Languages, a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote in May 2001: "There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology in our college. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, and a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic -- the first software of this size available in Gaelic."

How about the internet and endangered languages? "I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help."

Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in 'Kreyl'. In addition, one will find doc.u.ments related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial Creole, and I am open to publis.h.i.+ng others in Spanish and other languages. I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web."

Guy added in June 2001: "Kreyl is the only national language of Haiti, and one of its two official languages, the other being French. It is hardly a minority language in the Caribbean context, since it is spoken by eight to ten million people. (...) I have taken the promotion of Kreyl as a personal cause, since that language is the strongest of bonds uniting all Haitians, in spite of a small but disproportionately influential Haitian elite's disdainful att.i.tude to adopting standards for the writing of Kreyl and supporting the publication of books and official communications in that language. For instance, there was recently a two-week book event in Haiti's Capital and it was promoted as 'Livres en Folie' ('A mad feast for books'). Some 500 books from Haitian authors were on display, among which one could find perhaps 20 written in Kreyl. This is within the context of France's major push to celebrate Francophony among its former colonies. This plays rather well in Haiti, but directly at the expense of Creolophony. What I have created in response to those att.i.tudes are two discussion forums on my website, Windows on Haiti, held exclusively in Kreyl. One is for general discussions on just about everything but obviously more focused on Haiti's current socio-political problems. The other is reserved only to debates of writing standards for Kreyl. Those debates have been quite spirited and have met with the partic.i.p.ation of a number of linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their non- academic nature."

Robert Beard, co-founder of the yourDictionary.com portal, wrote in January 2000: "While English still dominates the web, the growth of monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various solutions to the font problems. Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do not see the web contributing to the loss of language ident.i.ty and still suspect it may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."

LOCALIZATION AND INTERNATIONALIZATION

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Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library at the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), wrote in August 1999: "I think it is inc.u.mbent on European organizations and businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if resources permit. In this age of globalization and electronic commerce, businesses are finding that they are doing business across many countries. Allowing French, German, j.a.panese speakers to easily read one's website as well as English speakers will give a business a compet.i.tive edge in the domain of electronic trading."

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In 1999, the subt.i.tle of Babel's website was: "Towards communicating on the internet in any language..." Babel was a joint project from Alis Technologies and the Internet Society to contribute to the internationalization of the internet. Babel offered a multilingual website (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish), with information about the world's languages, and a typographical and linguistic glossary. "The Internet and Multilingualism" section gave information on how to develop a multilingual website, and how to code the "world's writing".

Bill Dunlap, founder of Euro-Marketing a.s.sociates, a company based in San Francisco and Paris, launched the international marketing consultancy Global Reach as a methodology for U.S. companies to expand their internet presence into an international framework. This included translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and using local online banner advertising to increase local website traffic.

Bill Dunlap explained in December 1998: "Promoting your website is at least as important as creating it, if not more important. You should be prepared to spend at least as much time and money in promoting your website as you did in creating it in the first place. With the Global Reach program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken, and achieve a wider audience... and more sales. There are many good reasons for taking the online international market seriously.