Stories

Is the dill wlhall on the web?
I am Ana Alonso Ortiz, a Zapotec woman from the northern highlands of Oaxaca in Mexico. In particular, I am from the Zapotec town of YalÃĄlag. I am an anthropologist and a Zapotec linguist. I am a speaker of dill wlhall. In this contribution to the report on the State of the Internet’s Languages,​ I will talk about the presence of the Zapotec languages ​​on the web and the challenges to make the web a place that speaks other multiple languages, in our case Zapotec.
Decolonizing Minority Language Technology
Whenever we use computers and smartphones, we make use of language technology (NLP, from Natural Language Processing), even if we are not aware of it. We use it when typing and using text prediction, or when using a search engine, or we turn to automatic translation for getting the gist of a passage written in another language. Without even noticing it, language technology has crept into our lives. But technology is never neutral: it is developed by humans and reflects their mindset and culture.
Indamyo Sho Shikwaghiwa Pakuyugha iChindali Ukwendela pa Makina gha Intaneti: Abayughi Baku Chikaya Chakwa Chisitu, ku Misuku, mu Malawi
Chindali chili pamupeneshe nifiyugha fyakufumila cu chi Bantu. Pakabalilo aka chikuyughiwa na bandu bo bakwikala cu maghamba gha cu Misuku, mwi Boma lya Chitipa cu Malawi. Kunyuma uko chayughiwa nabandu pabu pipi 70,000 mu Malawi. Pakabalilo aka, ubwingi bwa bandu bakuyugha ichindali bwaba bunandi nongwa shafipani, ukonganikilana, nubwikalilo, nishingi sho shingabapo muchisu icha Malawi.
Why do we have to write in another language?
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.
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Ishan Chakraborty on the street, standing next to a braille inscription on a wall.
The Unseen Story: accessing disability and queerness online in Bangla
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
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 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 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
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
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.