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We should recall that most of the world’s languages are represented in an
essentially symbolic way with a few pages dedicated to them, and only a
minority of languages are genuinely present.
Given that Facebook, Google and Wikipedia are strong trends on the Internet,
it is by no means trivial to note that the famous social network has menus in
less than 1% of the world’s languages, that the almost global search engine
only provides at present language recognition for about 50 languages, and
that only 5% of languages are represented in the famous encyclopaedia, which
nevertheless seems to be the virtual location that is the most open to languages.
In fact, there is at present no system of language recognition for any language
of American or Oceanian origin on Google 10 .
We said it in 2008, but it is worth repeating, that the phenomenon of the
disappearance of languages, caused by several factors in the near past
(colonization, genocide, epidemics, war, displacement of populations,
prohibition on the use of the language, etc.), has grown as globalization
has gathered pace, with its technological, political, and socio-economic
consequences, in particular migration and urbanization.
As a general rule, languages that used to play an important role in the past have
experienced a significant decline in sectors linked to knowledge, to the benefit
of English. All languages of European origin, apart from some minority or sidelined
languages that have been able to make a come-back in recent years, have
been affected: German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and so on.
What is the Situation of Romance Languages
Among these European languages, the Neo-Latin languages are also affected.
Despite the fact that the main Romance languages played a major role for
nearly 1,000 years, in particular French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian
(without forgetting the historic, and literary and lexical mark made by Occitan,
Catalan, Norman, Venetian and many other Romance languages), they are
today diminished, and the action of languages as vectors of knowledge and
international negotiation is reduced.
Of course, we understand that concerns about the ground lost by the Romance
languages might seem misplaced when 99% of the world’s languages have
an uncertain future. However, the Romance languages are losing ground in
international organizations, scientific and technical expression, international
governance, higher education and international negotiations. They are
10
It should be noted that we refer to “recognition” when the engine can search in a language and find results.
Google might offer interfaces in a given language –in 120 to date — but that does not mean that the engine
recognizes the language.
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