[Corpora-List] Re: Minor(ity) Language

[Ed Kenschaft]

On 3/9/06, Nicholas Sanders <nick at semiotek.org> wrote:
> But the Polish and Icelandic examples don't fit the model,
> because they have no official status in the countries cited.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think *any* language has official
status in the United States.  Does that mean we don't have any
minority (or majority) languages?

Still, you make a good point.  A language that is clearly not a
minority language worldwide (e.g. Hindi) might well be a minority
language in a specific context.  Thus complicating the terminology
still further.

On 3/8/06, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On this side of the Atlantic, the term seems to be "low density
> languages" ...

In my circle, the most common term might be "scarce-resource
languages".  (We got tired of explaining to people that the meaning of
"low density" had nothing to do with density.)  The term gets at the
idea that a language might be spoken by a lot of people, but still not
have a lot of computational resources available (e.g. Hindi, Urdu).

Cheers.

--
Ed Kenschaft
ekenschaft at gmail.com
www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/kensch/