Stories

¿Está el dill wlhall (o Zapoteco Serrano del Sureste) en la web?

Ana D. Alonso Ortiz

Soy Ana Alonso Ortiz, zapoteca de la sierra norte de Oaxaca en México. En específico, soy del pueblo de Villa Hidalgo Yalálag. Soy antropóloga lingüista. Hablo el dill wlhall. En esta contribución al Reporte del Estado de los Idiomas de Internet hablaré de la presencia de las lenguas zapotecas en la web, de los desafíos y retos para hacer de la web un lugar que hable otras lenguas, en nuestro caso el zapoteco.
De-colonizzare la tecnologia per le lingue minoritarie

Claudia Soria

Anche se non ne siamo consapevoli, ogni volta che usiamo il computer o lo smartphone usiamo una qualche forma di tecnologia automatica del linguaggio (TAL o NLP, dall’inglese Natural Language Processing). La usiamo quando digitiamo e utilizziamo la funzionalità del testo predittivo, o quando ci serviamo di un motore di ricerca, oppure quando ricorriamo alla traduzione automatica per capire il senso di un testo scritto in un’altra lingua.
The Challenges of Expressing Chindali Language Online: Perspectives from the Native Speakers of Chisitu Village in Misuku, Malawi

Donald Flywell Malanga

Chindali or Ndali is a Bantu language spoken by people of Misuku hills in Northern Malawi. Previously, it was estimated that there are approximately 70,000 speakers of the Ndali language in Malawi. However, the number of speakers has declined drastically in recent years due to political, social, cultural and other contextual factors.
Why do we have to write in another language?

Emna Mizouni

In Digital Citizenship, we were interested in supporting Whose Knowledge? in this research to reach out to African and Arab content creators and consumers to share their experiences in posting content in their own language and create more visibility and online exposure for their cultures. We were able to interview practitioners and users from Tunisia, Uganda, and Sudan. Our interest was to understand the African cultural background, and when we started to interview them, other practitioners from the Netherlands, Singapore and India, wanted to express themselves and to give their views on the topic.
Marginality Within Marginality

Ishan Chakraborty

As a queer person with visual disability, born and brought up in Kolkata, I have noted that discussions (in the forms of video, article, blog, etc.) on the intersections of marginalities in Bengali are extremely scarce and inadequate on the internet. This is an area which deserves much more rigorous research and close analysis. I believe that in the complex socio-economic contexts of West Bengal and Bangladesh (the two places in the world where the majority of the population is Bengali speaking) any discussion on marginality must pay particular attention to the issues and ideas of intersections of marginalities.
Ishan Chakraborty on the street, standing next to a braille inscription on a wall.
The Unseen Story: accessing disability and queerness online in Bangla

Ishan Chakraborty

This is Ishan Chakraborty. I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Jadavpur University. Presently I am also pursuing my PhD from the same department under the supervision of Professor Ananda Lal and my area of research is on Rabindranath Tagore and his plays. My area of interest includes disability studies, critical disability studies, gender studies, 19th century literature, postcolonial studies etc. I’m also into elocution. I identify myself as a queer individual. I am a person with profound visual disability or blindness, and I have difficulty hearing in my left ear. So in that sense, I’m also a person with deaf-blindness.
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Learning and Reclaiming Indigenous Languages of Turtle Island within the Twitter Ecosystem

Jeffrey Ansloos / Ashley Caranto Morford

Through funding by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we have been developing a community-engaged research program called the #DecolonizingDigital Project, which tries to better understand Indigenous peoples' utilization of social media platforms. In particular, we have been considering how Indigenous Peoples from across and beyond Turtle Island (colonially called Canada, the United States, and Mexico) have been promoting the survival and learning of Indigenous languages through hashtag and other keyword networks.
Signs across generations: how the Arrernte emojis are bringing an Indigenous language online

Joel Liddle / Caddie Brain

Joel Liddle and Caddie Brain of the Indigemoji Project, Australia, are in conversation with Sneha P.P. and Anasuya Sengupta in this video interview. They describe how emojis representing the Arrernte indigenous language were created in an exciting multi-generational effort, and analyse the broader challenges and opportunities for bringing indigenous languages online.
The use of our ancestral language as a tool to preserve our identity in the digital age

Kimeltuwe Project

Kimeltuwe is an educational initiative that emerged in 2014 with the aim of becoming a visual educational project for contributing to the teaching and learning of the Mapuche language. The purpose of Kimeltuwe is to share graphic and audiovisual material in Mapuzugun around different topics of interest through different online platforms. In general, the material is aimed at teachers, but also at the dissemination and revitalization of Mapuzugun in the context of new technologies and social networks.
Flickering Hope: Challenges in Creating Online LGBTQIA+ Content in Bahasa Indonesia

Josia Paska Darmawan

Growing up in a small town with limited access to the outside world, I had to rely on the internet to find information about gender and sexual orientation. As a teenager from a family with low socio-economic status (SES), my English comprehension was still very limited, so the existence of LGBTQIA+ content in Bahasa Indonesia was very much needed to answer many questions about my self-identity as a queer individual. Unfortunately, it was —and still is— so difficult to find educational and positive queer content in Bahasa Indonesia on the internet.
Amidst Virtual Impunity: The experience of using local languages online in Sri Lanka

Uda Deshapriya

Sri Lanka is home to people belonging to several ethnic groups who speak a number of languages. Sinhalese and Tamil are the official languages in the country. Studies show that there are 7.3 million internet users in Sri Lanka, while 6.2 million people actively use social media. In fact for some, social media is the internet. If you ask someone in a village whether they are familiar with the internet, they may say no. But they may tell you that they are on ‘FB’. The majority of social media users in Sri Lanka access the internet through mobile phones, at the same time, the number of mobile subscriptions exceeds its population.