IGF 2020 WS #271 Multilingualism online: old challenges and new perspectives

Relevance to Internet Governance: The issues related to multilingualism and the use of different writing systems in the Internet are only mildly related to technical issues - by now mostly solved - but mostly to implementation policies and policies affecting deployment and use. The complexity of the matter, the cost of deployment, the need for international coordination, call for robust policies and support and a robust governance that is not going to be simple to design and implement. The objective of achieving equal opportunity of access and best use of the contents by worldwide users cannot be left to market forces and needs a governance process. In short, we need to make policy decisions and define governance processes in order to balance the competing interests and priorities. One example among many about the opportunity of influencing market forces is the initiative of the Government of the Indian State of Rajasthan to provide email addresses in the local script for every citizen of the State. This case is referenced in “Optional Documentation”. In order to ensure Universal Acceptance and full multilingualism on the Internet we need to make policy decisions and define governance processes.

Relevance to Theme: There is a huge variety of languages and writing systems - as a matter of fact the vast majority of the world population does not speak English as a first language and has a language that uses a writing system that is different from the Latin alphabet. For example, India, has 23 officially recognised languages not to mention the existence of nearly 1400 other dialects. An Internet that is not multilingual and not accepting different writing systems is a serious obstacle for digital inclusion because it does not provide equal opportunities to users who are not familiar with the globally or locally dominant language and writing system. This happens even in the developed countries where parts of the population, for instance elderly people, who have more difficulties in accessing an Internet that is not sufficiently localised, end up in being marginalised. This exclusion is also reflected in the limitation in the production and fruition of local content in the Internet, hindering also social inclusion, in a world that is becoming more and more connected. Nearly 40% of the world's population (3.2 billion) are unconnected - over a billion of them, for example, in South Asia alone. To bring connectivity to them is just the first step, because they will remain lagging back unless they are going to be able to communicate online in the way that they are used to communicate offline.