2011-12-06
Language revitalization through free software: the case of Aragonese
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| Santi Paricio (L) and Juan Pablo Martínez (R) |
KPS: Please tell us a little bit about the Aragonese language, how many speakers there are currently, whether it’s taught in schools, etc.
SP/JPM: Although there are no official data, it is estimated that some 10,000 native speakers in the north of Aragon (less than 1% of the Aragonese population) plus an indeterminate number of second-language speakers speak Aragonese. The number of native speakers is dramatically decreasing mainly due to the fall of intergenerational transmission. In most areas, only older people use the language. In contrast, there is a certain interest among young and mid-age people to learn the language in areas where the language is not spoken anymore as a native language. Some of them are even raising their children in Aragonese.
You can hear the sound of Aragonese at the Archivo Audiovisual del Aragonés.
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| Aragonese Wikipedia |
As for resources, Wikipedia in Aragonese is probably the main one nowadays. It is a very active project (the most active Wikipedia in terms of size per number of speakers), and represents now the widest corpus in Aragonese which can be found on the Internet (with the advantage of being free content). It has also acquired the attention of Aragonese mass media, with several interviews on the public radio station and a full-page story in the main newspaper. We are currently involved in developing open-source tools for the language: spell checkers, machine translation systems, online dictionaries… We can also highlight the efforts in the field of distance language learning; for example the non-profit cultural association Nogará-Religada which launched distance courses in Aragonese in recent years, based on the Moodle platform and assisted by other technologies, such as VoIP.
SP/JPM: Most native speakers wouldn’t even think about using the language online, because the language still has a stigma of being “bad speaking”, “useless language”, “only valid to speak about the rural world”. Some don’t even feel comfortable using the language outside their family circle. This does not fully apply to the youngest generations who have received the language from their parents: they often have a better linguistic awareness, as a part of their identity, and are less reluctant to use the language online, at least when communicating with known people. However, as most of them have not received any education in Aragonese, nor have they ever written the language, they often feel insecure about it. On the contrary, speakers of Aragonese as a second language are more likely to use Aragonese online, not only as a communication tool with other Aragonese-speaking Internet users, but also as an activist decision to promote the language. We think that the main driving forces for using the language online are activism and identity.
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| The proposed official orthography |
KPS: How is/was computing terminology developed? Is there a “language board” or are terms developed naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they communicated to the community?
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| Bilingual signs on a hiking trail (CC-BY) |
KPS: Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?
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| Aragonese-speaking village of Ansó (CC-BY-SA) |
SP/JPM: It is difficult to say. The dream scenario would be that children in the speaking areas would be able to learn the language at school, and children in the rest of Aragon would have the opportunity to learn it. Aragonese society should also be more aware of the cultural value of their own language. With support from the Administration and Civil Society, the objective of preserving intergenerational transmission and increasing language vitality could be achieved. In terms of online use, the aim would be that Aragonese speakers find the tools and resources to use their language online (translators, spellcheckers, speech synthesis and recognition, localized applications…), to get and create content in their language, and to use it correctly.
In more realistic terms, we believe that the use of the language online and the availability of online/computer language resources will indeed increase in the coming years, and this will open opportunities for the language, but this by itself does not guarantee the survival of Aragonese. The language must be transmitted to the children, and they need to learn to read and write the language at school. Otherwise, the efforts we are undertaking in the “digital world” might be useless. On the positive side, while decades ago it was already thought to be very close to extinction, Aragonese is still a living language in the 21st century, and we are working to keep it alive.
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