Alright, that's great to hear – I'm very happy to be proven wrong about my
pessimism. :-) My point about most languages having a very small number of
speakers I think still stands, *but* there are plenty of bigger languages
as well where the number of speakers would be enough for wiki projects, so
consider my objection nullified. :-)
2017-02-10 12:08 GMT+01:00 Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen(a)sil.org>rg>:
In response to the question of New Guinea languages:
SIL is probably the one organisation [1] working in most of those
languages, almost half of all in PNG alone, which includes over 2,500
publications and a large body of unpublished works about and in 389
languages [2]. Access to amenities including the internet is spreading fast
[3], and mobile penetration is at 50% [4]. So, I am actually rather
optimistic, not least as I'm aware of minority language activities in PNG
being vital and continuing to go strong. Whether that means we need an
additional New Guinea language expert, or whether it will be sufficient to
rely on my SIL contacts (which do include PNG), that's another question
which I refrain from answering here now as I may be perceived as biased on
that issue. But Jon Harald asked for correction if necessary, and I at
least felt the need to balance his outlook. I very much support the
promotion of Internet-based movements in PNG, and I believe it makes a lot
of sense.
[1]
http://www.silpng.org/
[2]
http://www-01.sil.org/pacific/png/show_lang.asp?by=langcode
[3]
http://www.oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/papua-new-guinea%E2%80%99s-
internet-gaining-speed
[4]
https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Papua-New-Guinea-
Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses
On 10-Feb-17 01:28, Jon Harald Søby wrote:
[...]
This might be nitpicking, but I don't necessarily agree that we should be
looking for New Guinea language specialists. Yes, I'm aware that there are
1500 languages (¼ of the world's languages by some estimates) spoken in New
Guinea, but I don't think it makes sense for us to be giving too much
weight to that at this point. The vast majority of these languages are
spoken by small tribes who live in the middle of the forest, often lack
access to basic amenities, let alone the Internet, and whose languages have
never been written before. (I'm generalizing broadly now, and am no expert
in Papuan languages, so please correct me if I'm mistaken!) This is not to
say I wouldn't welcome any Papuan language specialists, I just think it
doesn't make sense to make that a priority for an Internet-based movement
like ours. But anyways, this is not very related to the point of this
thread.
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