Multilingualism

IGF Hyderabad
Dawit Bekele
Manager, African Regional Bureau
Internet Society

1
http://www.isoc.org
Introduction
• The Internet was highly dominated by English until very
recently. In 2004, 70% of Internet users used English
• Things are changing rapidly though. There are more Chinese
speakers than English speakers and many other languages
have reasonable presence according to some statistics.
• 50% of the users (perhaps even 70%) of the users use other
languages such as Chinese, Japanese, French, german,
Arabic, Portuguese, Korean, Italian
• This first 10 top languages account for 84.9% of all users,
which is a big improvement, but we are still very far from true
multilingualism considering that there are 6,000 languages
around the world
• Unfortunately, there are still billions of the people of the world
that still cannot access the internet, because of language
issues
• Of course, language is not the only barrier to access. But, as
physical access improves, language become the single most
barrier to real access
• I believe that unless we do something about it , we will see a
increasing divide between those who can reap the benefits of
the internet and those who can’t.
2
http://www.isoc.org
• Then how can we get to a more
multilingual Internet
• It is a very difficult goal, since there are
many socio, economic and political
challenges, but I believe that the
Internet will be more and more
multilingual and that we can all help in
speeding up this process

3
http://www.isoc.org
Challenges

• Social
– Writing system. Many African languages
do not have writing systems, or their
populations are not literate in their own
languages.
– Illiteracy: In spite all efforts worldwide,
illiteracy is rampant, especially in
developing countries.
– Language resources: No terminology for
computing terms, which is dragging
behind localization efforts for example

4
http://www.isoc.org
• Economic
– There is not a critical mass of people
speaking that language on-line: not
economically viable
– Economic power of those on-line and
speaking the language may not be
important. Ex. there are languages like
many Ethiopian languages that have
millions of speakers but with a low income
that doesn’t interest private investors,
others like Icelandic that have very few
speakers but with some economic power

5
http://www.isoc.org
• - Political
– There are some languages that are
supported by the political environment (ex.
SA with 11 official languages), others that
are practically banned (I won’t mention
them not to banned from entering some of
this countries)
– Some languages are spoken in many
countries (ex. Tigrignya is a language
shared by Ethiopia and Eyritrea, two
countries at war), which makes it
impossible to have cross border activities

6
http://www.isoc.org
• Technical
– Scripts that are not in Unicode
– No keyboard standard. In Ethiopia, it took many years to
establish a keyboard standard for the Ethiopic script but
the standard is still not adopted by users
– Lack of localized software including OS and browser,
which limits the number of languages that can be used
from the offset (Windows is only available in Africaans for
African languages, there were works to have windows in
Swahili, Amharic and some other African languages but
they have not materialized yet
– No search engines, OCR, Translation services, speech
to text translation
– Not enough technical capacity for local language content
development. In Ethiopia, official websites are in English,
mainly because there are not enough developers who
master the development of content in the local language

7
http://www.isoc.org
• Due to all these challenges there is an acute
lack of contents and applications in most
languages of the world
• There are some other challenges why it is
difficult to build content in some languages
– There is no content on those languages even on
paper
– There is no computerized application that can
easily be put on-line (government is not
computerized)
– There is no way to do e-commerce on line because
there is no on-line payment method, no cyber-law,
nor certification, etc

8
http://www.isoc.org
Solutions
• The solution are local, regional and
international
– The international solutions
– Unicode
– Sharing of experiences
– Observatories to study the situation of which language
is getting more represented than others
– The regional solutions
– Activities that concern cross-border languages than
can not be done at local level: IDN Arabic
– Applications (ex. common economic and language
space)- ex Swahili
– Local solutions
– Incentives for users and content producers: Tax
exemption, loans for computer access (Algeria)
– Standardization
– Awareness (users and policy makers – obligation to
have the website in the local language)

9
http://www.isoc.org
Conclusion

• The problems are complex and the solutions

are found at local, regional and international
level
• At international level the discussion should
continue to support the local and regional
initiatives
– Example, a few people like Michael Everson has
enabled many scripts from the developing nations
to be on Unicode
• It should find allow exchange of experiences
so that the local initiatives learn from other
initiatives
• Evaluate the situation on regular basis,
including by developing reliable observatories
10
http://www.isoc.org