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Welcome, Don<br>
<br>
Below is an expanded account of my personal observations about language and
technology in Asia. It repeats some of the same information as before, but
if you didn't read my first post, or if you are interested in finding out
more, you might find it interesting:<br>
<br>
When I was living in Asia in the 1990's, computer technology relating to
Asian languages was evolving with remarkable speed. In the early 90's, it
was extremely inconvenient to use non-Latin Asian writing systems over the
Internet, hence the small number of speakers of those languages who used
the Internet tended to use English, other European languages, or romanized
versions of their own languages. <br>
<br>
Now, in 2003, the situation has completely changed--the idea of not using
one's native language on the Internet has already become incredibly quaint.
Go to an Internet cafe in Taiwan or Thailand (two of the countries that
I have lived in) and you will see young natives of those countries writing
to each other exclusively in their native languages. <br>
<br>
Indeed, this has become a necessity, because while, for example, the small
minority of Thai businessmen who used the Internet to communicate with each
other in the early 90's could write English well enough to communicate, now
that even tiny rural villages in Thailand have Internet cafes, the large
majority of Thais would not be able to communicate well in English even if
they did not now have the technology that allows them to communicate in Thai.
<br>
<br>
It has been a kind of circular revolution: the technology has allowed people
to use the Internet in their own languages, which in turn has brought huge
numbers of new users and new native-language content, which in turn has spurred
more technological development. <br>
<br>
My wife is an interesting example: she is Japanese, but was living in Guatemala
for a short time in the 90's. By that time, Japanese-language e-mail was
well established in Japan, but it was not a feature you could count on having
on computers outside of Japan. Her e-mail messages to other Japanese people
during that time were mainly romanized Japanese (which is not particularly
easy to read), with some English and Spanish words mixed in. <br>
<br>
As soon as the technology allowed her to write in Japanese, she immediately
switched to the Japanese writing system. Japanese-language software, also
allowed her, by the way, to have a very wide access to Japanese language
media, even while she was not living in Japan. <br>
<br>
A couple of years ago, we were living in Osaka, Japan. One evening, we were
going home on the train, and she suddenly got very excited, and pointed out
a large advertisement. In fact, most of the people in the car seemed to
be discussing that advertisement. It was for software for her native dialect,
the Kansai dialect, which is quite different from standard Japanese. It
showed two examples of phonetically inputing the Kansai dialect into a word
processor. The first was using normal software, which would result in the
program misreading variant Kansai-dialect grammatical particles as Chinese-character
vocabulary items. Correcting this would require time-consuming manual input
which would discourage the writer from using the dialect on a personal computer
at all. The second example showed the same phonetic input using the new
Kansai-dialect software, which would correctly "read" the variant grammatical
particles, resulting in a much quicker and more easy writing experience;
one which certainly encourages Kansai-dialect speakers to write e-mail in
their own dialect, rather than in Standard Japanese. <br>
<br>
Now, in Japan, as in most of the rest of the world, the minority languages
and dialects are losing ground to the "standard," dominant native language--in
effect, standard Japanese is swallowing other Japanese dialects, as well
as other traditional languages like Ainu and Okinawan. The Kansai dialect
is bucking this trend, however--in my experience, it is the dialect that
the vast majority of Kansai children speak at home--there is no question
that it is the dialect that my wife will speak to our future children. <br>
<br>
Part of this stems from the reality that Kansai people have made it very
cleare that they want the media and technology to be available to them in
their own dialect. As in the case of the software program I mention above,
the demand is creating a supply, which in turn reinforces the continuing
viability of the dialect. <br>
<br>
Another good example of this is in Hong Kong--although the software for most
minority (non-Mandarin) Chinese languages has not yet been sufficiently developed,
Chinese language software for speakers of Cantonese (which includes a fairly
large number of characters which are used in Cantonese but not in Mandarin)
is very widely available and widely used. The Chinese language software
I have on my computer at home, for example, includes Cantonese characters.
Although I personally have no understanding of Cantonese, the software I
downloaded for Mandarin Chinese included software for Cantonese characters
as well. With this state of affairs, you can imagine that Cantonese speakers
have a much easier time writing in their own dialects than do speakers of
other non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and that this contributes to the very
healthy state of the Cantonese language. <br>
<br>
Obviously, most indigenous people find themselves in a much more difficult
situation than do the Kansai Japanese or Kong Kong Chinese, the latter which
enjoy great economic power and large regions with millions of native speakers
of local dialect or language. Still, there is no question in my mind that
developing software for all languages has tremendous benefits. It is certainly
a huge incentive to people to use their own native languages on computers,
online and in e-mail. Since there seems to be a wide degree of agreement
that in order for languages to continue to be viable in the long-term, they
need to be able to be used in all contexts, making the computer technology
available to speakers of all languages is one of the most important things
that needs to be accomplished. <br>
<br>
With that in mind, I have to say this: given the tremendous complexity of
the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, if those two languages can be made
fully operational on computers and online (as, indeed, they have) then the
technical aspects of writing indigenous languages (which are, worldwide,
mostly written in some form of the Latin alphabet) cannot really be a huge
obstacle.<br>
<br>
Don Osborn wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid005d01c38d13$dcc07000$76e4fbc1@gktg001">
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<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">Greetings!
I am new to this list and am looking over some off the archives.<br>
Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings.<br>
<br>
Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the<br>
evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or
so<br>
(my wife is Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things<br>
are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some<br>
differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial<br>
languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal<br>
languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages,<br>
lack of standard orthography). One wonders about the potential for more<br>
multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines<br>
between technologies become more blurred.<br>
<br>
>From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text<br>
e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West<br>
European languages. For the many languages using modified letters and those<br>
using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable<br>
than those faced in Asia. Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies<br>
with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only<br>
be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get by
with<br>
substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters,<br>
still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up. Just recently
on<br>
the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an<br>
ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to happen,
and<br>
a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did).<br>
<br>
Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the<br>
list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while
at<br>
</font><a href="http://www.africast.com"><font face="Times New Roman"
size="3">http://www.africast.com</font></a><font face="Times New Roman"
size="3"> . Haven't checked to see if the two are<br>
intercompatible.<br>
<br>
Don<br>
<br>
Don Osborn, Ph.D. </font><a href="mailto:dzo@bisharat.net"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">dzo@bisharat.net</font></a><br>
<font face="Times New Roman" size="3">*Bisharat! A language, technology
& development initiative<br>
*Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement<br>
</font><a href="http://www.bisharat.net"><font face="Times New Roman"
size="3">http://www.bisharat.net</font></a><br>
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