Again, we could use this set as an alternate T seed, and again the results would be unchanged. Input-level support means the availability of some specific method, such as Kotoeri for Japanese, to enter text in the writing system used for the language. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. With 1.35 m speakers, and official status in two countries (Senegal and The Gambia), Mandinka is neither endangered nor threatened in the traditional sense SIL puts its EGIDS rating at 5 (developing) and notes the positive attitude speakers of all ages have toward the language. "Offering Gaelic to children of people who don't speak it seems like a conservation of lost glories. 515. In digitally vital languages this happens quite effortlessly and automatically, but languages the new generation no longer considers cool are caught in a pincer movement, with the old generation unable and unwilling to enter the digital world and the younger generation no longer considering the old language relevant. in Menomini [7], Gaelic [8], and Dyrbal [9]. Collecting larger corpora, the lifeblood of modern language technology efforts, also requires standardized spelling. As expected, the first several releases stayed entirely in the thriving zone, and to this day all language pairs are across vital and thriving languages, with the exception of French Haitian Creole. Stage one is some kind of locale or i18n (computer shorthand for internationalization) support that enables the input (writing) and output (reading) of native characters. Comments by the Editor and anonymous referees have led to very significant improvements. As a matter of fact, new languages can be produced by children from unstructured input in a single generation [25] Nettle D, Romaine S (2000) Vanishing voices: The extinction of the worlds languages. The average number of native speakers in this group is 174.4 m, the real ratio is 0.340.10, and the average adjusted wikipedia size is 1.63 g chars. 215262. The classical studies of language death lay down one absolutely unbreakable rule: no community, no survival. The digital situation is far worse than the consensus figure of 2,500 to 3,000 endangered languages would suggest. Quakenbush JS, Simons GF (2012) Looking at Austronesian language vitality through EGIDS and SUM. Scannell KP (2007) The Crbadn Project: Corpus building for under-resourced languages. First, to control for the fact that the same number of (multibyte) characters will contain different amounts of information depending on writing system, we computed the character entropy of the language, and used it as a normalizing factor: for example, one Chinese character corresponds to about four Dutch characters, an effect quite visible if one compares the character counts of the same document, such as the UDHR or the Bible, in different languages. National; 2 Provincial; 3 Wider communication; 4 Educational; 5 Developing; 6a Vigorous; 6b Threatened; 7 Shifting; 8a Moribund; 8b Nearly Extinct; 9 Dormant; 10 Extinct. Be it as it may, Google Translate for any language pair currently likes to have gigaword corpora in the source and target languages and about a million words of parallel text. We surveyed Google Translate to probe this increasingly important area of functionality, but we emphasize here that stage three has more to do with the line between our top two categories, thriving (T) and vital (V), while our primary concern is with the gap between vital and still (S) languages. Part of the simplification relative to EGIDS comes from the favorable demographics discussed above. At the end of last year the project received 2.7m euros to identify those languages most at risk. Michael Krauss famous remark Television is a cultural nerve gasodorless, painless, tasteless. will also be available for a limited time. There are 51 heritage languages with Wikipedias, plotted in blue. The biological metaphor of viewing languages as long-lived organisms goes back at least to Herder [1], and has been clearly stated in The Descent of Man The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. About 6,000 different languages are spoken around the world. Chris Mason: Real jeopardy as Tories pick final two, Why some viewers are switching off Netflix, Kyiv residents hope to rebuild damaged flats. The most blatant of these Potemkin wikipedias is #37, Volapk, which is based almost entirely on machine-generated geographic entries such as Kitsemetsa Kitsemetsa binon vilag in grafn: Lne-Viru, in Lestiyn. It's not what professors of linguistics or academics or journalists say, but what people do. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AK. Until such a comprehensive study is conducted, we must use the publicly available textual material as our proxy this has the advantage that all such material was put there knowingly by their authors, so concerns of privacy are resolved in advance. People do care about identity as they want to be different. Their digital presence is read only, maintained by scholars. Is India gaining over China in crisis-hit Sri Lanka? "I do think it's a good thing for a child on the Isle of Man to learn Manx. We run two hundred paired experiments. The and seeds will overlap completely, as we use the union of our earlier and . Why do companies get involved in social issues? Remarkably, the performance of our classifiers, originally built on 33 features (for a complete list see File S2) improves markedly if we drop out those features that contribute little and retrain on the rest. Sage Publications, 128 pp. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the Sociocultural Situatedness, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Whenever the two classifiers agreed, we used this result. ", Sri Lanka elects new president opposed by many, Wildfires rage as heatwave moves across Europe. In Europe, Mr Ostler's view seems to command official support. But for a language to spread to these new or newly democratized functional areas, one generally needs a bit of software. The adjustment in most cases shrinks the wikipedia by less than a third, and in some cases such as Czech (real ratio 0.53) actually increases the size. Digital ascent is the opposite process, whereby a language increasingly acquires digital functions and prestige as its speakers increasingly acquire digital skills. Whenever we encountered languages with no ISO code, and no code on the Linguist List (see http://linguistlist.org), we generated a non-authoritative internal code that begins with xx so as to maintain unique identifiers suitable for joining rows from different sources. This is because spellcheckers enforce the unified literary standard of a koin, with significant suppression of individual and dialectal variation. Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1, Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishmans GIDS. In the Discussion section we provide several examples of the kind of languages like Ancient Greek (grc) that were not included in the seeds for building the classifiers, but were nevertheless deemed heritage by almost all classifiers. There are many languages with standard input methods but no standardized orthography, and the next step up the digital ladder is a spellchecker. Performed the experiments: AK. We also looked at HunSpell (the largest family of FLOSS spellcheckers, see [20]) for each language, and assessed its coverage by computing the percentage of words it recognizes in the wikipedia dump. But that makes no sense because cultural forms are lost all the time. communication and measure the proportion of material in the language in question. We can generally put together a gigaword corpus just by crawling the web, and the standardly translated texts form a solid basis for putting together a parallel corpus [33].
The machine translation services offered by Google are an increasingly important driver of cross-language communication. Nurturing Native Languages : 5357.
In: Nicolov N, Bontcheva K, Angelova G, Mitkov R, editors, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing IV. With a sizeable population of speakers that enjoy a high standard of living, a nearly saturated personal computer market, and good access to broadband networks, based solely on census data and wikipedia statistics Nynorsk would appear a prime candidate for digital ascent. One possible method of fleshing out the classification would be to set some thresholds so that languages over (say, 100,000) digital natives are considered thriving, those with fewer (but not zero) are considered vital, those with zero L1 speakers but more than (say, 100) L2 speakers are considered heritage, and the rest still.
However, as soon as we realized that some parameters like L1 and L2 span many orders of magnitude, and switched to logarithms for these as discussed in Methods (for a complete list, see File S2), classification performance improved markedly, with results now in the 85100% range (see Table 1). We emphasize that this massive die-off is not some future event that could, by some clever policies, be avoided or significantly mitigated the deed is already done. OS-level support means that all interaction conveyed by the operating system, such as text in dropdown menus or error messages, are provided in the language in question. Therefore it makes sense to simply count these resources and use the resulting number as a figure of merit: what we find is that there are only 244 languages that have . State censuses generally address the question of linguistic and national identity, and tribe sizes are well known within the community, so it is generally not hard to get at least a rough order of magnitude estimate on the number of speakers. Rehm G, de Smedt K (2012) The Norwegian Language in the Digital Age: Norsk i Den Digitale Tidsalderen. But for some this is not just a waste of resources but a misunderstanding of how language works. 2. Another highly relevant website is Omniglot, the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, see http://www.omniglot.com. Similarly, languages with some input support either from Microsoft or Apple (or both) will have a spellchecker with 68% probability, while languages that lack input support have only 1.1% chance to have a spellchecker. VideoBlind masseurs struggle after Shanghai lockdown, Four ways climate change is affecting weather. The need for creating a wikipedia is quite keenly felt in all digitally ascending languages. Literacy in the traditional sense is a clear prerequisite of digital literacy, and languages without mature writing systems are unlikely to digitally ascend. Those features that contribute little to the classification have small weights (in absolute value), those that contribute a lot have greater values. Unsurprisingly, the best predictor of digital status was the traditional status. There are glimmers of hope, for example [2] reported 40,000 downloads for a smartphone app to learn West Flemish dialect words and expressions, but on the whole, the chances of digital survival for those languages that participate in widespread bilingualism with a thriving alternative, in particular the chances of any minority language of the British Isles, are rather slim. The axis, also log scaled, shows the adjusted wikipedia size. Volapk, ranked 37 by article count, is ranked 163rd by adjusted wikipedia size. The last two may superficially look peculiar to the digital domain, but as we shall see, they are just convenient proxies for assessing a traditional yardstick, the functional spread of the language. Read about our approach to external linking. As an example consider Mandinka, which is, besides Swahili, perhaps the single best known African language for the larger American audience, thanks to Alex Haileys Roots. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. And when governments try to prop languages up, it shows a desire to cling to the past rather than move forwards, he says. Ideally, we should capture all videoconference (Skype), cellphone, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Careers, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany. government site. "Language is the dress of thought," Samuel Johnson once said. Here support is more spotty even the most broadly used tool, HunSpell [20], is available only for 129 languages, http://hlt.sztaki.hu/resources/hunspell. Such individual judgment could only be made based on specific facts about the language in question, facts that need not be encoded in our dataset, and we see many examples of languages whose digital future is unwritten. And every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues. Altogether we estimate the rate of extinction to be 95.5%, with an uncertainty of about 0.4%. Next, there is loss of prestige, especially clearly reflected in the attitudes of the younger generation. As we shall see, basing the choice on criterion (v), and selecting the top 16 wikipedia languages as alternate seed will lead to essentially the same results. 12-ICAL. No matter how we look at it, we have over 8,000 digitally dead languages, a quarter more than the 6,541 with no detectable online presence that we started out with. Further, we can check the effectiveness of the method both by internal criteria, such as the quality of the resulting classifier and its robustness under perturbation of the seeds, and by external criteria, such as comparison with other classification/clustering techniques. The classifiers, both individually and collectively, identify a vast class of digitally dead languages that subsume over 96% of our entire data. In spite of the uneven coverage and quality of these tools, they already represent a level of maturity that is very hard to match by an underresourced language. By definition, digital ascent requires use in a broad variety of digital contexts. We have not surveyed speech and character recognition software, not because they are any less important, but because their quality still improves at a fast pace, and languages that lack these today may well acquire them in a hundred years. Based on the four seeds , and we trained several maximum entropy classifiers: 4-way classifiers S-H-V-T that distinguish all four classes; 3-way classifiers S-H-VT that treat T and V as one class of digitally alive languages but keep H and S separate; 3-way classifiers SH-V-T that treat S and H as one class of digitally dead languages but keep V and T separate; and 2-way classifiers SH-VT that simply probe the main digital divide, with T and V in one class, and H and S in the other. Zsder A, Recski G, Varga D, Kornai A (2012), Rapid creation of large-scale corpora and frequency dictionaries. SALTMIL. The average number of speakers is 8,787 (because several languages like Breton and Proven cal are listed with significant numbers of L1 speakers in the Ethnologue), the real ratio is 0.100.12 (we consider any real ratio above.1 reasonable), and the adjusted wikipedia size is 2.25 m chars. Simons GF, Lewis MP (2013). In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture. That said, we can still demonstrate that the overall picture is remarkably robust under changes to the details of our method. Dot size shows real ratio, color shows status: Thriving dark green; Vital light green; Heritage blue; Still black; Borderline red. I don't see why it's in the public good to preserve Manx or Cornish or any other language for that matter." Other than converting the nominal classifications to numeral (e.g. Since digital ascent means active use of the language in the digital realm, we need to identify at least one active online community that relies on the language as its primary means of communication. The modern EGIDS classification [11] extends the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) of Fishman [12] to the following 13 categories: 0. International; 1. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. In our subjective estimate, no more than a third of the incubator languages will make the transition to the digital age. By now, the Bokm l wikipedia is four times the size of the Nynorsk wikipedia, but Nynorsk is still in the top 50. Even more relevant to our purposes is the level of support for computer-mediated activity in a given language. Email: info@bostico.uk, Privacy Policy
In the digital age, these signs of incipient language death take on the following characteristics.
[28].
Experience with the individual cases suggests that no more than 150 of these languages are actually vital but, in keeping with the conservative methodology outlined at the beginning, we are prepared to overestimate the vitality of the rest. Varga D, Halacsy P, Kornai A, Nagy V, Nemeth L, et al.. (2007) Parallel corpora for medium density languages. Received 2013 Feb 13; Accepted 2013 Aug 30. Video, Kyiv residents hope to rebuild damaged flats, Netflix loses almost a million subscribers, Apple settles US keyboard legal action for $50m, EU told to prepare for Russian gas shut-off, Busiest day since WW2 for London firefighters, Tories in last vote before leadership run-off, Russia expands war aims beyond east Ukraine. We plot only wikipedia (including incubator) languages. A weaker condition is the availability of online text in OLAC, a stronger condition would be the availability of an input method. () We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. Cazden CB (2003) Sustaining indigenous languages in cyberspace. The average number of native speakers in this group is 15.9 m, the real ratio is 0.220.18, and the average adjusted wikipedia size is 32.5 m chars.
From [16], where such competitors are called polluters, we see that the most important ones are English, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, German, Dutch, and Portuguese, in this order, with other languages like Arabic or Polish listed as competitors only on one occasion. Of these, about a hundred are unquestionably viable. Bostico International - We don't just translate, We Communicate! The feature encoding the EGIDS assessments by SIL experts was selected in all models, the feature encoding the Endangered Languages Project assessments was selected in all but one. the results of French instruction, to which oodles of resources are devoted, that we could not expect to produce speakers sufficiently fluent to marry each other, make babies, and bring them up speaking the languages. Altogether, we have 7,879 ISO codes (the number is larger than the size of the February 2012 dump because the site now provides codes for many newly registered languages), with the balance coming from other sources, to which we now turn. There are no remaining functions assigned to the language by any group (). This makes language preservation projects such as http://www.endangeredlanguages.com even more important. Language endangerment and language death, in the traditional sense, are widely investigated and actively combated phenomena. There could be another 20 spoken languages still in the wikipedia incubator stage or even before that stage that may make it, but every one of these will be an uphill struggle. To summarize a key result of this study in advance: No wikipedia, no ascent. This suggests that in the long run no more than a third of the borderline cases will become vital. To establish the seed for the heritage group we manually selected a small group of unambiguous heritage languages: Aramaic (arc), Old Church Slavonic (chu), Coptic (cop), Manx (glv), Ancient Hebrew (hbo), Classical Chinese (lzh), Sanskrit (san), and Syriac (syc). Once the orthography is standardized, the university (where the main language of education is Russian) can in principle turn out computational linguists ready to create a spellchecker, an essential first step toward digital literacy [39]. Those 16 languages that have the maximum were collected in : English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (both Brazilian and European), Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokml), Danish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), and Korean. If it has input-level support by Apple, with 87% probability it will have input-level support by Microsoft as well, but if it lacks input-level support by Apple, Microsoft will remedy this with less than 1% probability. Any number below 50% indicates the spellchecker is not mature. This way, not only the thresholds themselves, but the intrinsic error of threshold-based classification can be investigated based on the data. A consolidated version of our main data table, 8,426 rows by 92 columns, is available as File S1. 
extinct languages starting with m
