[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:32, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language
>
> "It is believed that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in
> the world will have become extinct by 2050, as the world's language system
> has reached a crisis and is dramatically restructuring."
>
> How is Wikipedia going to affect this language disaster? WMF 2050 goals
> ideas : ) ?

Extinction estimates are outdated from the point of contemporary
technology. Many languages now have much more chances to survive than
it was during the time before Internet. And, unlike natural sciences,
that part of linguistics is based on older data.

Every language incorporated in Google Translate has a lot of chances
to survive. If Google starts to support smaller languages (or some
other project develops free to use translator), those languages will
have good chances to survive.

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are also important factor.
Stable open content projects on Internet allow people from all over
the world to contribute, which includes scattered diaspora, which
usually have better education.

There are also other factors. For example:
* Sorbian languages [1] (Upper [2] with 40k of speakers, Lower [3]
with ~10k of speakers) will survive as cultural artifact, connected to
the identity of Sorbians. It could be compared more with remembering
genealogical tree than as useful medium for communication. The fact
that Germany is rich country has two opposite tendencies: from one
side, Sorbians are fully integrated in German society and they tend to
know German better than Sorbian; from the other side, as German
citizens, Sorbians are rich and if they want (as they want) to
preserve the language of their ancestors, they have means to do that.
Former estimates didn't count any of Sorbian languages to have chance
to survive.
* Alekano language [4] (~30k of speakers) also wouldn't be counted
into the survivors. However, it has coherent community inside of the
diverse central Papua, it has university and university has internet
access (although expensive at the moment).
* However, language with the similar speakers population in rural
India doesn't have a lot of chances. Non-Han languages of China can to
be much smaller to have good chance to survive than Han languages of
China. And so on.

Note that estimates from the past (and likely from the present) count
that no language with less than 1M of speakers would survive 2050.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Sorbian_language
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Sorbian_language
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alekano_language