Indigenous languages in Internet

Last week, during Pope Francis’ trip to South America, one of the recurring topics around this pastoral visit was the situation of the indigenous people in the Continent. Personally, I cannot say many things about this very complex topic. But there is one thing that I can say about indigenous languages, not only in Latin America, but in North America as well, one thing that anyone with a computer connected to the Internet can confirm, and is that those languages are underrepresented in Internet.

If we read Wikipedia or any other text about Geography, we can see that out of 35 independent countries located in our continent, 21 of them have indigenous native languages spoken in their territories. Among them, only 3 countries, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru have declared formally one or more indigenous languages as state official languages. Other countries have indigenous native languages declared as official at a regional or at a local level. We may think that this means that those governments should have services available in those languages in the areas where they are recognized, and this includes the use of online resources. I am unable to describe the quality of services that speakers of indigenous languages receive from their respective governments in their own locations, but I am able to say that online services are almost inexistent, I have checked different websites from different national governments, ministries, institutions, regional and local governments, embassies abroad and other diplomatic missions and in most cases I did not find any site offering services in the languages of their first Nations. The most remarkable exception was the official website of the government of Nunavut Territory in Canada where residents have services available in English, French, Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.  If we count non independent territories, the government of Greenland also have an official website with information available in English, Danish and Greenlandic.  In Latin America, the government of Paraguay in its website has a Machine translator Spanish – Guarani, but its Secretary for Linguistic Politics offers their website in Guarani and Spanish.  

Not many people know that Mercosur, The South American trade bloc, adopted in 2006 the Guarani language as official. However, its official website and all the documents are only available in Spanish and Portuguese.   The rest of intergovernmental organizations including OAS (Organization of American States) do not use any indigenous language as official. (I read that the Andean Community also recognizes indigenous languages, but I could not find any document that confirms this declaration). If anyone knows about the existence of any governmental website in any indigenous language, feel free to send me the links.

The most widely spoken indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (6 – 7 million speakers), Guarani (almost 6 million), K’iche’ (2.3 million), Aymara (2.2 million) and Nahuatl (1.5 million). There is a site for Quechua language called runasimi that presents the Quechua language and this site itself is in Quechua, with options to read this page in German, Spanish, English, French and Italian. It also has links to other websites in Quechua. For Aymara its website provides information about this language, with discussions and samples of poetry and documents in this language, however, this page is in Spanish. Other pages using the name of the language in their domain, they are not in the language they represent.  The page for Inuktitut has publications in Inuktitut, and the possibility to navigate in this language.

Today, most of the Internet sites related with Indigenous languages were created for Education and Research and universities and independent research institutes are involved in their publications. There are resources available in terms of Language courses and dictionaries for most of languages. The question is: what can we do on the Internet using any of those languages?

There are very few websites and blogs written in different indigenous languages. The main News websites do not have services in those languages, and I checked broadcasters from very different countries, UK, Germany, Russia, China and Vatican City. However, some of the most important high tech companies are working to include indigenous languages in their platforms. Microsoft has versions available in Quechua and Cherokee. Firefox is available in Guarani and Kaqchikel Maya and is working to include more languages. If you open an Account with Gmail, you have the possibility to set it in Aymara, Cherokee, Guarani or Quechua, and the same happens with Facebook. The mobile app Amikumu currently covers most of the indigenous languages allowing members to find people nearby who are speakers, students of those languages or just interested in them, and they can also use their mobiles to chat. Duolingo, the famous web page where you can learn languages for free, has recently opened a course online to learn Guarani, although you have to know Spanish first to take this course. Perhaps the biggest work for inclusion can be seen in Wikipedia, where there are articles available in Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, Nahuatl, Navajo, Greenlandic, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Inuktitut, Inupiaq and Cree.  Unfortunately, Youtube does not have captions available for those languages. The 2 translation Machines that I use the most, Google translator and Yandex translate do not have options to translate in any of the languages here mentioned. One of the CAT tool that I use, Word Fast, has the option to work making professional translations to languages such Otomi, Quechua,  Aymara, Guarani, Navajo, Cree, Ojibway, Inupiaq, Inuktitut, Yucatec and Kallalisut   (Greenlandic). Some languages require a special keyboard for writing, the web gate2home  offers the possibility to set a keyboard for Inuktitut and Cherokee script.   

At this point, I have only written about a few languages underrepresented on the Internet. But according to some sources, between North America, Central and South America, there are around 750 indigenous languages spoken, 186 in Brazil alone and 169 in the US. What happened with the rest of languages that have very little or none activity on the Internet? According to UNESCO, most of the indigenous languages are in danger. With very few speakers, some of them even do not have 1000 speakers, they are struggling to survive. The priority here is how to stop the extinction of this language and its related cultural background.

Why Indigenous languages of the Americas are underrepresented in the World Wide Web? The first answer we get to this question is related with colonialism and Prejudice against those languages and their speakers.  I believe that when the word Colonialism is used in this context, there are political intentions. But I agree that the languages of the first Nations for long time were not considered as prestigious languages, and this explains the lack of interest to learn and speak those languages, even for younger Members of the ethnic groups related with the language. Unfortunately, there are still areas where those languages are not really valued. I would add some other important points:

-Almost all Indigenous languages have strong Oral literary tradition but they do not have written texts. Many languages just recently adopted an alphabet. Writing has its unique challenges that we do not face when we use the spoken language. Many people who use 2 or more languages with high degree of fluency do not feel comfortable using those languages in written, not even in their own mother tongue.  If we are going to post messages, news, stories, articles, we need some training in the use of grammar, form, style.

-Still, Indigenous people face high rates of illiteracy. Many other who can read and write have studied in schools where the quality of education was not good. 

-In a panel discussion broadcasted by Deutche Welle from Paraguay, Linguist Edith Penner, one of the experts said that although Guarani is used in the formal Educative system of Paraguay, this language is taught like we teach a classical language, full of traditions and myths, but not like a language that we can use for our work, business, research. This example is repeated in other countries with other languages. 

-People who learn those languages, they do not learn them like they learn a working language.  The motivation to learn them is different, most of the time the reason is to talk to their own families and communities or to have access to some traditions related with it. Some non indigenous learn them just for research.

-The first move to write in those languages on the internet comes from people who are bilingual, who have a good command of languages like English, Spanish or Portuguese, and thus they have more opportunities to surf in the World Wide Web and get better ideas about what to post, what to publish. Monolingual speakers of those languages are less likely to connect to the Internet.

In my opinion, Internet has created a new reality that cannot be ignored, and languages will have to abide with these new rules in order to survive. Internet can be a very strong ally, where we can express our feelings and in the language we want. There are some language success stories. Around the world, we have Hebrew, a language that was dead and now it’s a national language with more than 8 million speakers. We have Esperanto, a constructed language just more than a century old, a language with aprox 2 million speakers and some Native speakers as well, a minority in front of other main languages in the world, not official anywhere but at the same time, a language whose speakers know how to play with the new globalization rules and found ways to spread it all over the world using Internet. By the way, Esperantists tend to be very sensitive to any issue regarding languages and can be very good allies. Indigenous languages in America have also examples of success stories from within. We have the case of Guarani, an indigenous language that is now the National language of a whole country, having more speakers than Spanish itself in Paraguay, and an important group of speakers are not even members of any indigenous ethnic group, something remarkable. 

But there is another ally that can be used: Mobile phones. Mobile technology has such acceptation and statistics that I read they show a high penetration of mobile phones through Latin American countries. The use of resources in those languages in the form of apps can be a good start to assure more presence to the languages of our first nations in the World Wide Web.   

It is important that speakers need to have an environment where their language can be used as a working language, they can do business, and they can benefit from them. But this change will come from indigenous people by themselves, rather than from politicians who need to use them in their rhetoric, or researchers who just learn those languages for their own work.

From within indigenous communities there are well educated people working to open new possibilities for their ancestral languages in the Internet. I recognize those initiatives and fully support them. but I am afraid that if rather than highlight the advantages of a Bilingualism the same speech about colonialism is kept, younger generations will be more reluctant to master in the use of their ancestral language and help it integrate to this new world, more and more Interconnected.