Irene Russo

In this talk we will introduce the Digital Language Diversity Project, a three-year project funded under EC Erasmus+ programme that started in September 2015. The project addresses the problem of the scarce use and usability of EU regional and minority languages in digital media and over digital devices, with the aim of providing basic know-how to help anyone who is willing to become the restorer of these fading languages on the web. The main outcome of the project will be a training programme for adult speakers of regional and minority languages to empower them with the know-how for creating and sharing digital content.

Somewhere a language dies every two weeks. One tile of the complex mosaic resulting from human evolution - the ability to communicate ideas and opinions with language - is lost forever. You may think this is happening in remote islands you have never heard about, because of the death of the last speaker. In reality, this is starting to happen just around your corner, with minority languages often neglected by local institutions, with speakers not aware of their bilingualism, with activists lacking tools to preserve their languages. In this respect, digital media represent a challenge and an opportunity for minority languages. They are a challenge, because regional and minority languages are severely underrepresented on digital media, and almost completely excluded from digital services which are usually available in EU national languages only. This situation is expected to worsen in the near future, because current technological development is primarily focused on English and on a handful of other major languages, neglecting EU languages with less economic power. But digital media represent an opportunity as well, since they can provide minority languages the strategic opportunity to have the same “digital dignity”, “digital identity” and “digital longevity” as large, well-developed languages on the Web, and thus contribute to their usability in an everyday context that is of foremost importance. The Digital Language Diversity Project, a three-year project funded under EC Erasmus+ programme that started in September 2015, addresses the problem of the scarce use and usability of EU regional and minority languages in digital media and over digital devices. The aim of the project is to provide basic know-how to help anyone who is willing to become the restorer of these fading languages on the web. The main outcome of the project will be a training programme for adult speakers of regional and minority languages to empower them with the know-how for creating and sharing digital content. Trainees will learn about some basic actions that could improve the digital vitality of their minority language or could help others in this praiseworthy task. Both as a coder and as a speaker, they will learn how they can contribute to make Europe the stage where all languages are represented digitally. As coders, they can help building basic language resources such as annotated datasets, lexical resources, crawled corpora etc. using freely available toolkits and crowdsourcing methodologies. As speakers, they will learn about all the opportunities to improve and augment the presence of their (minority) language on the web, helping with the translation of Wikipedia pages, writing subtitles for TED talks or just recording pronunciation of words for the Forvo community. Other outcomes will be: - a survey detailing the digital fitness of four regional/minority languages spoken in Europe: Basque in Spain, Breton in France, Karelian in Finland, and Sardinian in Italy; - “Digital Language Survival Kits”, i.e. recommendations about what needs and can be done for a language “to go digital”: which are the challenges and difficulties, which areas need to be addressed first, which tools are available. The recommendations will comprise a tool for self-assessing the digital fitness of languages other than those comprised in the case study. - A roadmap, aimed at stakeholders and policy makers, detailing the institutional and technological challenges as well as the proposed solutions for paving the way to a more widespread use of all European languages over digital devices