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Another example of mutually beneficial partnership is one between Wikimedia’s
Amir Aharoni and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thanks to Aharoni’s
efforts, a professor of the Economics Department now asks his students to
write Wikipedia entries instead of conventional course papers. The students
get additional grade points while Hebrew-speaking Internet users get 20 new
articles on economics.
And in Kazakhstan, the Wikipedia writer known as Asel has sent a letter to the
republic’s culture minister, asking him to tend to Wikipedia’s Kazakh-language
segment. Fueled by the government’s directive support, Kazakh Wikipedia is
facing a real boom now.
Technical problems with scripts. Script availability is a rather specific issue,
to be considered separately from the more general problem of ICT use. The
adoption by the international community of the Unicode system has facilitated
software support for most of the world’s languages, including Yakut. It has
received individual codes for the five letters unique to its alphabet. There is
no need now to readjust other coding systems to user needs. But there are
problems yet to be solved. One is the reluctance of script producers to include
the atypical letters of Russia’s minority language alphabets into their products.
Which is hardly surprising, though, given the lack of economic incentives.
At long last, Russia’s government has started placing orders for the development
of integrated scripts supporting the Unicode and the alphabets of all of the
federation’s constituent ethnicities. The Russian company Paratype has
developed the first digital scripts (PT Sans and PT Serif) and presented them
to the public. There are just two such scripts so far, and their number is unlikely
to increase any time soon. In the Windows operating system, some of the default
commercial scripts support letters by many alphabets, but not all, and not to
an equal degree. Such scripts are also preinstalled in software programmes
produced by Apple and ones based on the UNIX/LINUX platform.
Conclusion
Every culture is valuable and unique, and the disappearance of any single one
will be an unrecoverable loss for the entire human race. Multilingualism’s
cultural significance has global proportions.
Linguistic pluralism is necessary and desirable because traditions are a strong
factor of stability in human society. A person fully exercising his or her rights
in the native language and culture feels a full-fledged community member and,
hence, can counter modern challenges more effectively. In other words, the
preservation of languages and attention to the problems of ethnic communities
are not just cultural issues, but also safeguards for a secure future of humanity.
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