Challenges for linguistic minorities on the internet

(The following are talk on Challenges for linguistic minorities on the internet at RightsCon 2020 on dt July 31 2020)

Hello to all the panelists here with me and all the participants.

I am R Ashwani Banjan Murmu Wikimedian of Santali Language from India.  I am also working for the promotion of Santali Language and Its script called Ol Chiki. 

In the context of India, let me begin with one of the basic things, that is, for accessing the internet one needs a device, either a computer laptop or a tablet or at least a small smartphone and second is internet connectivity. It is believed that India is the place where the cost of internet accessibility is comparatively cheaper than other countries. of course it is easily affordable for the middle class income group in India but we must also not forget that the linguistic minorities of India mostly belong to Indigenous communities who are largely very much poor and belong to low income groups. A monthly internet pack from the cheapest company will cost one day’s wages in this community. Similarly many of the people in rural India are still using non-smart mobiles devices, which do not connect with the internet. Computers and the internet are words that the indigenous communities have only heard and have not yet experienced.

Secondly there is an issue of connectivity. I contribute to the Santali Wikipedia which is also one of the Indigenous languages of India. We in santali Wikipedia have contributors from different states of India. Most of the Santali contributors belong to the hilly area. Many of them get scholarships to afford the internet accessibility. But again the challenge is the poor internet network connectivity. Mostly they fail to contribute up to their potential due to poor connectivity. The quality of Internet connectivity is very different between urban areas and our villages. Even the cities near rural areas have network failure for several days sometimes. The infrastructure for good internet connectivity is yet to be developed either by private internet companies or by the government.

Thirdly, the challenge is with literacy: According to the 2011 census of India literacy percentage among indigenous communities is only approximately 59%. Nearly half of the population of this community is illiterate. This literacy rate is in the officially recognised language of the states of India. But the language used on the internet is usually English, it is not in the language they are acquainted with. Therefore, even if some people in this community are able to afford the internet and smartphones, it has no value if it is not in the language they know. Santali language is one of the officially recognised languages of India. In spite of that the online resources or information are not adequately available in this language. The languages that are not officially recognised are in a worse position. For this reason, often minority language communities feel like they are being deprived of access to information.

If we talk about the Santali community. They don't want merely public information only. Along with the publicly available information, there must be a reflection of their own language, tradition and culture on the internet. They want to see their own script, stories and news about themselves in the Santali language. There is a huge need for the availability of a source of Information in the Santali language on the internet and other digital platforms.

The last one, which I believe is one of the prominent issues is that many of the scripts of Indigenous languages do not have a developed typeface (that is, design of the lettering or fonts) for input in computers and mobiles. Some indigneous languages have a typeface, but their script is not included in Unicode. Unicode is a computing standard that enables text communication on the Internet and digital devices. This is a major issue we can say for a linguistic minority community. The Internet world is not ready to welcome them. The software developer and programmer have to do a lot of work to give a taste of the internet to these communities.

Opportunities and Hope: In the recent past, the Government of India has taken some small steps. Vharatvani is such a programme, under which the government has started a multilingual portal of 92 languages which comprises all the 22 official languages and other minority languages. This project is the source of knowledge in all these 92 languages using multimedia (that is, text, audio, video, images) formats. Such processes need to be followed by each state of the country as well as the NGOs in order to make available the access of the internet to all the marginalized communities.