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Sponsors and Collaborators
The Language Observatory project was initiated by the authors in 2003 and
received funding from the Japan Science and Technology Agency from 2003
to 2007. At the kick-off event, held at Nagaoka University of Technology on
February 21, 2004, UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) sector
was represented by Mr Paul Hector.
The project interacted and collaborated with many partners from various parts
of the world, and joined with the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN) at
WSIS in Tunis in November 2005 at a workshop on African languages. Among
the attendees were the President of ACALAN Adama Samassekou, Daniel
Pimienta of FUNREDES, and Daniel Prado of Union Latina.
We agreed to organize a joint African web language survey project. In 2006,
we held a workshop in Bamako, Mali, in cooperation with ACALAN. Many
African researchers interested in language diversity and the digital divide
issues attended the workshop.
After a fruitful workshop in Bamako, we planned a set of events to publicize
our project. Workshops were held at the UNESCO headquarter in Paris on the
International Mother Language Day in 2007 and 2008.
The first complete observation report was published in 2008. It was the first
article on language distribution on the Asian Web providing an overview of
web pages collected from Asian domains. The authors concluded that there is
a serious digital language divide in the region. English was very widely used
especially in South Asian countries and in the majority of South East Asian
countries (60% of the web pages were in English). In West Asia, English
dominance was less outstanding, and in some countries Arabic was the most
widely used language. In Central Asia, Russian was the most widely used
language except for Turkmenistan where English was used at 90% of the web
pages. It is also important to notice that some of the indigenous languages,
Turkish, Hebrew, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Mongolian were the
most used languages in their country domains.
Linguistic Diversity on the Web
Lieberson’s Diversity Index
Lieberson’s Diversity Index (LDI) [4] is a widely used index of linguistic
diversity that is defined by the following formula, where P i
represents the share
of i-th language speakers in a community:
48
LDI = 1 - ∑ P i
2