Berto 'd Sera wrote:
Just getting a minimal user interface in their language is a considerable challenge.
This is a myth. It takes 2 days to ONE person to fully localize Wikimedia. And if you don't have one person willing to spend a couple of days (and more) you won't get any server space anyway.
That two days assumes a reasonable degree of computer literacy among the affected people, and a stable symbolic representation of the language in question. It also takes a tremendous effort to bridge the gap between the concepts of a highly technical society, and those of a pre-literate society whose language was suited to an agricultural or nomadic lifestyle. The gap between Italian and Piedmontese is tiny by comparison; both are romance languages.
Some of the languages from mountainous areas may not have the critical mass needed to keep them alive.
True. I'd say that most linguistic entities with only several thousands native speakers left are in serious trouble, Western Europe included. Based on what I saw thus far I seriously doubt that such small populations can make any positive use of a wiki (and of anything else).
I was thinking of languages like Haida and Kootenai where ther are fewer than 100 native speakers. What makes the latter interesting is that it is also a linguistic isolate.
They usually developed their cultures based on total insulation, while living in places that offered very little food (like mountains, but also tundra, deserts or jungles) but very good protection based on inaccessibility, and can hardly stand the overwhelming cultural impact that comes with a sudden increase of social connectivity.
In the great prairie areas of North America when food became scarce in one place it was relatively easy to travel to a better area. The culture was built around such a nomadic existence, and became spread over a wider area. In rain forests food tends to be more plentiful, and the barriers to migration are greater
Besides, basically all such entities are exposed to get the "social stigmata". Most young people from the community will rather hide their origins, trying to integrate in the dominant culture asap. When this happens often the number of female speakers starts to contract, since mothers feel they should provide their children with better "social identifiers". In time this leads to a situation in which children can hear the linguistic entity used only by elders.
Here there has been some reversal of this in recent years, but it may not be enough to undo the damage done by the cultural genocide of the residential schools where native children were taken from their families and put into an English environment where they were forbidden to speak their native languages.
When you have a big population (say millions) you often find a determined minority wishing to "get their roots back", based on what they heard from their elders. But if you start from just several thousands people your statistical chances of success get very low.
I can't see how you could change their social self-perception either. The efforts of the Russian Government to protect the Veps minority did not keep it from getting smaller and smaller, and the one Veps I know admitted to be a Veps only years after we got to be friends, while perfectly knowing that I'm the kind of person that can only have a positive impression of such a thing.
The pride and positive self-perception cannot be supplied by outsiders. For the successful native populations in North America cultural revival has needed to be accompanied by economic opportunity within their own territories. It also requires having a leadership that is capable of pulling a population out of chronic depression.
"Declaring yourself a Veps" in Karelia (among other things) means access to special elite Moscow schools (there are a number of places reserved for minorities). Yet, the number of people making such a declaration of identity got 50% smaller since the help started to be given.
It says something about governments when they put such facilities in the capital instead of the indigenous territory where it would involve more people. If the most capable individuals among the Veps are being marinaded in the culture of the capital they may no longer be useful to their own people.
Maybe for such desperate cases one should choose a conservative stance, like saving all the material that can be saved (audio recordings, samples of crafts, elements of grammar, etc). In such cases I don't think there's much we can do as WMF, unless we open an entirely different set of projects and start to work in close connection with UNESCO.
A lot of these documents could fit into the mandate of Wikisource. It's also important not to get entangled in a lot of futile wranglings about intellectual property rights. Bureaucratically waiting until 50 years after the apparent author's death simply because you cannot determine who has the rights can be highly damaging to some of this material. All the people who can read and understand it now may not be alive in another 50 years.
No matter how you try, it cannot be done without some active "foreign" intervention. So while helping mankind to save knowledge about itself it will also push the linguistic entity towards death, by exposing it to an enhanced foreign presence/influence/attention. This is why I'm saying that such operations are dangerous in nature and they should be coordinated by expert neutral parties like UNESCO.
God save us from the experts!
Outsiders can provide the means in the form of such things as hardware, but they need to avoid introducing their expectations, and the presumptions that they take for granted.
Ec