Native Language Email (article)

[Matthew Ward]

Welcome, Don

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don Osborn wrote:

> Greetings!  I am new to this list and am looking over some off the
> archives.
> Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings.
>
> Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the
> evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so
> (my wife is Chinese).  In the case of Africa and African languages things
> are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some
> differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial
> languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal
> languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages,
> lack of standard orthography).  One wonders about the potential for more
> multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines
> between technologies become more blurred.
>
> From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text
> e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West
> European languages.  For the many languages using modified letters and
> those
> using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable
> than those faced in Asia.  Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies
> with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only
> be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get
> by with
> substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters,
> still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up.  Just
> recently on
> the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an
> ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to
> happen, and
> a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did).
>
> Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the
> list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while at
> http://www.africast.com .  Haven't checked to see if the two are
> intercompatible.
>
> Don
>
> Don Osborn, Ph.D.         dzo at bisharat.net <mailto:dzo at bisharat.net>
> *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative
> *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement
> http://www.bisharat.net
>

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