What about endangered languages? "I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help."
Robert Beard, co-founder of the web portal yourDictionary.com, wrote in January 2000: "While English still dominates the web, the growth of monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various solutions to the font problems. Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do not see the web contributing to the loss of language identity and still suspect it may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
The internet could be a tool to develop a "cultural identity" for any language, while using the English language for this, as stated by Guy Antoine, who founded Windows on Haiti in April 1998 to promote the Haitian culture and language.
Guy wrote in November 1999: "In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in 'Kreyòl'. In addition, one will find documents related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial Creole, and I am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages. I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web. (…)
The internet can serve, first of all, as a repository of useful information on minority languages that might otherwise vanish without leaving a trace. Beyond that, I believe that it provides an incentive for people to learn languages associated with the cultures about which they are attempting to gather information. One soon realizes that the language of a people is an essential and inextricable part of its culture. (…) ‘Kreyòl’ (Creole for the non-initiated) is primarily a spoken language, not a widely written one. I see the web changing this situation more so than any traditional means of language dissemination."
Guy added in June 2001: "Kreyòl is the only national language of Haiti, and one of its two official languages, the other being French. It is hardly a minority language in the Caribbean context, since it is spoken by eight to ten million people. (…) I have taken the promotion of Kreyòl as a personal cause, since that language is the strongest of bonds uniting all Haitians. (…) I have created two discussion forums on my website Windows on Haiti, held exclusively in Kreyòl. One is for general discussions on just about everything but obviously more focused on Haiti's current socio-political problems. The other is reserved only to debates of writing standards for Kreyòl. Those debates have been quite spirited and have met with the participation of a number of linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their non- academic nature.”
1997 > A EUROPEAN TERMINOLOGY DATABASE
[Summary] Launched in 1997 by the Translation Service of the European Commission, Eurodicautom was a multilingual terminology database of economic, scientific, technical and legal terms and expressions, with language pairs for the eleven official languages of the European Union (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish), and Latin. There were 120,000 daily visits on average in 2003. In late 2003, Eurodicautom announced its integration into a larger terminology database in partnership with other institutions of the European Union. The new database, called IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe), would be available in more than 20 languages, because of the enlargement of the European Union planned in 2004. IATE was launched on the intranet of some European institutions in spring 2004 and on the internet for free in March 2007.
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Eurodicautom was a multilingual terminology database of economic, scientific, technical and legal terms and expressions, with language pairs for the eleven official languages of the European Union, and Latin.