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Liudmila ZAIKOVA
Director, Centre to Advance Multilingualism in Cyberspace,
North-Eastern Federal University
(Yakutsk, Russian Federation)
Establishing the Centre to Advance Multilingualism
in Cyberspace under the North-Eastern Federal University
Promoting linguistic diversity in cyberspace has both cultural and political
significance. Dissemination of multilingual information on the history,
languages and cultures of different nations facilitates mutual understanding
and tolerance development.
Each language is a unique repository of the information on its speakers and their
culture. Recently, however, the process of languages extinction is becoming
rampant. According to pessimistic forecasts, by the end of the XXI century,
only about 10% of present-day languages may survive.
Numerous factors threaten the existence of a language: natural disasters,
leading to the death of entire peoples; weaknesses of the education system
discouraging children to learn school subjects in their native language; the lack
of writing to name a few. Any language’s extinction is a great loss, as languages
reflect historical experience and serve as a tool for socialization, expression and
transmission of social and cultural traditions. While facilitating the growth
of human knowledge, languages are a means of enhancing self-identification
especially important for their speakers.
In recent years a new factor has appeared, namely the rapid development of
ICTs and the Internet.
The Internet offers huge opportunities for users in terms of freedom of
expression, education and access to information. However, information and
services are accessible on the Internet only in dominant languages (about 400
out of the existing 6700 languages).
To help maintain linguistic diversity and its development in cyberspace
Centre to Advance Multilingualism in Cyberspace was established under the
Department of Information Policy and Communication Technologies of the
North-Eastern Federal University named after M. Ammosov (NEFU) by the
order of the NEFU Rector Evgenia Mikhailova on September 1, 2010.
The idea of creating such a center in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) has
arisen at the International Conference “Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in
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