Mozzeenet

While studies have shown that some local languages and dialects have been gradually falling out of use for a variety of reasons including the effects of globalisation and the increased use of languages such as English as a universal communication tool, some thought has also been given to the role the internet may play in preserving languages.

In Cambodia, I became aware of the importance of providing information in the local language (Khmer) but also understood the technical difficulty in doing this. Khmer script like Thai has its own alphabet. It’s a complex system and you’ll understand why I didn’t persevere trying to learn it (speaking was hard enough) if you check out the Khmer Alphabet information on Omniglot. There are no spaces between words, only at the end of sentences and there are many more characters and variations of characters than in English.

One way to view and publish Khmer on the web is to download special fonts but it is not easy to integrate such tools with the web editing programs in general use. Seeing the difficulty in achieving a local language version of a site and the paucity of local content made me realise how the web is biased towards people who are more educated, have greater access to technology and other resources.

This morning an article from UNESCO titled UNESCO Sponsored Research Finds WWW Fracturing Into Language Communities came into my inbox. It reports on research into the influence of the web on local languages. There seems to be evidence that more local language content has been published on the web medium which is cheaper and more accessible than audio-visual and print for example. The study was conducted on minority languages in Europe where the practice is more widespread than in Africa and Asia. An interesting finding was that the group publishing material in local languages was predominantly young, educated and male and the conclusion reached was that the growth of such content may result in a strengthening of group identity but may not necessarily mean the maintenance or revitalisation of local languages.