[Summary]
Despite the so-called hegemony of the English language, the
internet was also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who has taught computing at the Institute
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. Caoimhín has
maintained the trilingual (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, English)
college website, as the main site worldwide with information on
Scottish Gaelic, with a trilingual list of European minority
languages. The internet could be a tool to develop a "cultural
identity" for any language, while using the English language for
this, as stated by Guy Antoine, who founded Windows on Haiti in
April 1998 to promote the Haitian culture and language.
***
Despite the so-called hegemony of the English language, the
internet was also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who has taught computing at the Institute
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland.
Caoimhín has maintained the trilingual (Scotish Gaelic, Irish
Gaelic, English) college website, as the main site worldwide with
information on Scottish Gaelic, with a trilingual list of European
minority languages.
Interviewed in August 1998, Caoimhín saw four main points for the
growth of a multilingual web: “(a) The internet has contributed
and will contribute to the wildfire spread of English as a world
language. (b) The internet can greatly help minority languages,
but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people
want to maintain the language as an aim in itself. (c) The web is
very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big
demand for this. (d) The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set
standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the
Internet more multilingual.”
How about the Gaelic language? Caoimhín 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."
What about 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."
Robert Beard, co-founder of the web portal yourDictionary.com,
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 identity 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."
The internet could be a tool to develop a "cultural identity" for
any language, while using the English language for this, as stated
by Guy Antoine, who founded Windows on Haiti in April 1998 to
promote the Haitian culture and language.
Guy 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 'Kreyòl'. In addition,
one will find documents related to Haiti in French, in the old
colonial Creole, and I am open to publishing 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. (…)
The internet can serve, first of all, as a repository of useful
information on minority languages that might otherwise vanish
without leaving a trace. Beyond that, I believe that it provides
an incentive for people to learn languages associated with the
cultures about which they are attempting to gather information.
One soon realizes that the language of a people is an essential
and inextricable part of its culture. (...) ‘Kreyòl’ (Creole for
the non-initiated) is primarily a spoken language, not a widely
written one. I see the web changing this situation more so than
any traditional means of language dissemination."
Guy added in June 2001: "Kreyòl 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 Kreyòl as a personal cause, since that
language is the strongest of bonds uniting all Haitians. (…) I
have created two discussion forums on my website Windows on Haiti,
held exclusively in Kreyòl. 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 Kreyòl. Those debates have been quite
spirited and have met with the participation of a number of
linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their non-
academic nature.”