Hoi,
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Berto 'd Sera Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 4:37 AM To: wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia
Rodolfo M Vega wrote:
Yes, most situations are like that in Amerindian languages, and the process to create a more accepted alphabets is a political rather than "academic" one. But now, many Amerindian peoples have intellectual native speakers, many are writers and many are trained in linguistics, so the process to create an alphabet from the native perspective is more than possible, and far desirable, for the reasons you say. For example, Aymara already agreed on an alphabet for all Aymara, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, and they are in a process to create an Academy of the Aymara language, with representation from all these countries. Similar process I understand is happening in Maya, and in less extent in Mapuche (here, the competing alphabets differ only in a couple representation of specific phoneme). Soon or later, seeing new opportunities for information sharing (such as a Wikipedia in their own language, which is now under consideration in many groups) all Amerindian people will agree on an alphabet for their specific language.
The languages that you mention have a fairly large population. Most of the native speakers are elderly, and in that regard these oldsters are no different from their counterparts in larger cultures for whom computers do not fall within their comfort zone.
Ec
_______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l