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