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Claudia WANDERLEY
Researcher, UNICAMP University
(São Paulo, Brazil)
Multilingualism and Digital Libraries in Local Languages
Introduction
The Multilingualism in Digital World project has been held from 2005 within a
network of 11 higher education institutions in 8 Portuguese speaking countries.
After six years of a very intense experience on promoting multilingualism in an
academic ambience of monolingual (lusophone) tendency, we present some of
our main obstacles and some of the possible horizons that we could glimpse.
Our practical solution by now is to work with free operational systems, free
softwares, digital libraries and translations. We hope that our experience might
be useful to people interested in building a network like ours, to policy makers,
to start a broader debate on the construction of inclusive societies, or in short:
to start conversations.
1. Big Picture of the Project
Working in a team with researchers from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde,
Bissau Guinea, Saint Tome e Principe, East Timor, Macau (China), Portugal
and Brazil it is quite easy to think of post colonialism and on what does it
mean to develop common content in Portuguese that enable us to treasure, to
respect and to maintain the bonds with our local languages and cultures. These
countries and the region of Macau have Portuguese as their official language
due to previous Portuguese colonization.
I’ll focus on the situation of Brazil: Brazil or officially the Federative Republic of
Brazil has a territory of 8,514,877 km 2 , and a population of 190,755,799 (census
2010, IBGE), nowadays it has 39 linguistic families – the bigger diversity of
the continent - and around 200 living local languages/cultures. And if we say
that in 1500, at the time of the “discovery” of Brazil by Pedro Álvares Cabral,
our linguists estimate around 1,300 languages/cultures living in the territory
of what would become Brazil some hundreds years later, therefore more than
five sixths (5/6) of these languages are gone.
If we gather the local languages present today in all these territories which we
work with, we will reach around 700 living local languages, and surely a big
agenda to think how to manage to include these languages in digital world,
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