Lab/Multilingüe/Discurso

Language is the First Commons (A Decentralised Network)

Europe is rich in languages and languages are important commons. More and more Europeans are bilingual or multilingual. Language minorities that were discriminated against in the past, now receive public and community support. However, at the same time, these minorities are threatened by the homogenising practices and dynamics of globalisation. The European Commission has taken a public position in favour of linguistic diversity, while the European Council ‘Barcelona Declaration’ (2002) and other formal resolutions and recommendations (2008 and 2012) aimed to advance towards promoting multilingualism, ie. that citizens should learn two languages in addition to their own.

There are organisations such as Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity (NPLD), a European-wide endeavour working in language policy and planning for Constitutional, Regional and Small-State Languages (CRSS). There are also meetings in the European Parliament, such as the first STOA (Science and Technology Options Assessment) workshop in 2017, titled ‘Language Equality in the Digital Age – Towards a Human Language Project’. And there are European Projects that focus specifically on European linguistic diversity, such as ELDIA (European Language Diversity for All) or the Digital Language Diversity Project http://www.dldp.eu/, but it seems that their contributions do not extend to other kinds of projects.

European initiatives for developing local economies do promote local languages, and consider them an asset. One example is the LEADER programme ("Liaison Entreactions de Développement de l'Économique Rurale", linking between actions for the development of the rural economy). The website is in French, English, Spanish, Polish and Italian. Here "the microregional orientation is small enough to address the identity of the local communities as a driving force for local development while being large enough to bundle forces for concrete projects to reach critical dimensions and become effective as partners in global networks" (Lukesch and Schuh, 2007).

Paradoxically, most European Projects to develop digital initiatives use only one language (usually English), in some cases two (English and a local language or another post imperial language). Other digital projects based in America are more respectful of linguistic diversity.

Some examples of English-only European Projects are the Confine Project, Cap4access, P2PValue, DiDIY, OpenMaker, netCommons, DECODE or Making Sense. D-Cent has some information translated into Spanish.

A relevant case, here, is Wikimedia. Since its origins in 2001 Wikipedia has had different versions in different languages (currently 280) and each encyclopaedia has been written independently. There is no such thing as a ‘central’ encyclopaedia translated into ‘other’ languages. Items are created from scratch in each language or specific articles are translated into various languages, in different directions, without identifying any language common to all articles. Moreover, the Wikimedia Language Engineering Team are careful to respond to the diversity of challenges posed by using different languages and different writing systems or alphabets. They have found solutions for managing non-alphabetical languages, or writing and reading in different directions, etc. Using online community “village pumps”, the local chapters and contacts in their face-to-face meetings - the Wikimedia Language Engineering Team gets requests and contributions from all over the world.

Some of their wikis are multilingual, like Wikimedia Commons, Meta, Wikispecies directory or Outreach. These wikis use English as their central language from which content is translated, using an easy to use extension, into other languages. It is therefore difficult to create new pages based on any language other than English. By contrast, Wikidata, which has been developed by Wikimedia Deutschland and is key to unifying data from multiple projects, making it possible to create statements and properties and to enter values from any language, and then translate this content into other languages, regardless of the language of the already existing home data structure.

An interesting practice among wikimedians is the "Babel" Userbox for indicating, on their user pages, what languages they know and how well they know them (on a scale 0-5). This facilitates communication as any wikimedian can write to any other who may also know Esperanto, Arabic, Catalan, Dutch or Mandarin without needing to use English, French or Spanish, for example, as an intermediary. The level of complexity of the conversation will be determined by the degree to which each wikimedian understands their common language.