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Dzhavdet Suleymanov
Professor, Kazan State University;
Member, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan
(Kazan, Russian Federation)
The Tatar Language and ICTs
Introduction
In today’s globalised world, the demand for languages as cognitive and
communicative tools, as well as their development and even further preservation
as cultural phenomena are largely dependent on the use of information
technology.
Let us study the experience of introducing the Tatar language in cyberspace
(i.e. the space of human interaction with computer systems and technology).
Ensuring the Tatar language usage in computer systems can help it significantly
increase its relevance and competitiveness as a means of information acquisition
and human-computer interaction. It can also facilitate creating new processing
and storage technologies for data in the Tatar language considering a number
of its structure and vocabulary’ cognitive features.
To ensure equitable functioning of Tatar and Russian as official languages of
the Republic of Tatarstan it is vital to make Tatar really usable in computing
systems. Accordingly, special processing programmes for the Tatar language
should be created, and Tatar localizations for software are required.
In the late 1980s research and development on introducing the Tatar language
in IT began in the Republic of Tatarstan with the development of first peripheral
device drivers, text editors and a Tatar spellchecker necessary for publishing
Tatar books, newspapers and magazines in digital form, as well as for digital
recordkeeping. In 1993, a Joint Research Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence
Problems was established under the Academy of Sciences of the Republic
of Tatarstan (RT) and the Kazan State University to meet the challenges of
the Academy’s Scientific Programme on the Application of IT for Ensuring the
Usage of Tatar as a State Language of the Republic of Tatarstan and to develop
relevant software under the State Programme on the Preservation, Research and
Development of Languages ​of the Peoples of the Republic of Tatarstan.
In the last 15 years the Research Institute for Applied Semiotics and the
Research Laboratory for AI Problems have been active in the field of developing
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