This article Programming Africans’ linguistic needs from the IHT states that a lot of languages are not represented in cyberspace: mostly African languages. These languages are only spoken by a relatively small group with little economic power and therefore have little chance to survive in the digital era. But these regions are growing and start to be attractive for companies like Microsoft, especially in the light of the growing use of Linux systems in these countries.
A group of information architects are working on an input device for the Yoruba language so people who are not able to speak any Western language, are not forced to use pen and paper.
Unesco estimates that 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages are not represented on the Internet, and that one language is disappearing somewhere around the world every two weeks.
Today the new word is folksonomies. People tagging content for their own needs, to attract and hopefully to inform. One consequence of letting people run free on the internet is that they might come up with words from their own language, German, Spanish, Japanese and probably some more. Have a look at the Technorati tag page.
But why not Yoruba?
Yoruba and other African languages have no place on the internet, yet. If you look at the Yoruba alphabet it doesn’t seem to be particularly difficult to use on the internet. But these people have no computers and the input devices they have are not adapted to suit their needs.
Chinese and Japanese
lay-out keyboards exist and so do the Yoruba lay-out keyboard.
The article mentioned above from the IHT has been published for a while now and hopefully the creators of the keyboard will be successful. A search for pages in an African language didn’t give me any results.
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Odabọ