Relevance to Internet Governance: Part of the importance of Internet Governance is how it evaluates the consequences of the Internets rapid raise. Language endangerment should be seen as one such consequence.
As set out in the Los Pinos Declaration on the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032); which called for the design and access to sustainable, accessible, workable and affordable language technologies. Both UNESCO’s 2003 Recommendation concerning Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace and the 2020 Los Pinos Declaration on the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032), recognize the potential of digital technologies in supporting the use and preservation of low or under resourced languages.
This workshop will analyse the work needed to right the wrong created by the Internet, by focusing on the technologies and policy settings needed to revitalise endangered languages. For example, UNESCO’s International Conference Language Technologies for All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide, organized in December 2019, underlined efforts to develop spelling/grammar checkers up to speech and speaker recognition, machine translation for text and audio, speech synthesis, and spoken dialogue among others as important areas for enabling linguistic diversity and multilingualism.
This workshop will also highlight the work remaining to extend these technologies to under-resourced languages. This situation puts the users of many languages – a vast majority of Indigenous languages – in a disadvantageous situation, creating a digital divide, and placing their languages in danger of digital extinction, if not complete extinction. This work will require a multistakeholder effort – further linking this workshop into Internet Governance.
Relevance to Theme: The proposed session is related to the selected thematic track of “Digital Inclusion.” Frequently, as the Internet has very little or nothing to offer in the marginalized and endangered languages, and indeed oppresses them, these language groups lack the digital presence as they are underserved and suppressed.
Particularly in Africa, UNESCO has been vocal about the need for enhancements in language resources to enable technology solutions which can assist people limited by their language to interact in cyberspace. A salient example, in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, is how investment in open solutions for language technologies could lead to long term capacity enhancement to respond in public health crises is in the form of text analysis methods can be used to pre-warn health authorities of the outbreak (Tsvetkov 2017). For instance, social media posts in endangered languages could be analysed for outbreak of flu. This capacity simply does not exist at the moment – which is an issue this workshop seeks to address.
