Friday, August 24, 2007

Less resourced languages meet ... getting some projects on the way

Berto from the Piedmontese Wikipedia, who also has i-iter.org that deals with less resourced languages stayed here in Maiori for some days and so we had plenty of time to talk and consider many strategies on how to protect less resourced languages and the very specific culture of the various regions in the world. Well there is still much to be worked out, but one thing became clear: we are going to work much closer together than before and we will find a structure on how to make the most out of the efforts of so many people who care about the same goals.

So yes, the first Piedmontese-Neapolitan meet-up made some first results.

This is just a note to let you know: something is going on ... so stay tuned for more news :-)

2 comments:

M. Simon said...

A friend of mine looked at this question a long time ago (numbers may be different now) and found that a population of about 10 million speakers is necessary to maintain a language when isolated cultures start interacting with the world.

There are exceptions. Not many.

Probably the best we can hope for is to archive these languages for future study.

SabineWanner said...

Hi, well, it is indeed very difficult to get things on the way. Neapolitan has approx. 7 million speakers (estimated) maybe one million more if the United States are considered as well. Indeed we are only a handful of people who really work with the language, but on the other hand we can see an increasing interest in the written language and in localized software, such as computer games. There is that article about a computer game in Piedmontese written in Neapolitan. It now has 1880 reads and the number of reads is steadily growing. Just yesterday we had a look at google analytics and most visits to the article are unique ones, that is: more and more people look at it - just as if those who read it send the link on and on to friends. For this reason the localization of computer games will be one of our goals it will help people to remain in touch with their native language and they will get used to read it and hopefully one day to write it. If your friend has study material on this it would be great if he got into contact with us since he then probably is interested in such languages so he could also be interested in being part of our now very small, but growing interest group. Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to write your comment.

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