One interesting question is: what is a minority language? I am a native
speaker of Polish and I was somewhat surprised to see Polish included as a
topic at a minority language conference. From the point of view of the size
of the population it is hard to consider Polish as a minority language, from
the point of view of the cultural impact it has, it certainly is a minority
language. But I would say that the same is true of Russian now. So, where to
draw the line?
Best regards,
Tadeusz Piotrowski
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no
> [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Briony Williams
> Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 7:09 PM
> To: FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE
> Cc: corpora@lists.uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Re: 'Standard European English' ?
>
> FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE wrote:
> > Perhaps there is a desire to actually communicate with the largest
> > possible group, which almost certainly has a higher
> probability in the
> > unmarked Internet case in English, given the political, globalized
> > facts of life (as well as the obvious fact that English is the
> > most-taught and most-used second language in the world, although
> > Chinese begins to look like it may give us a run for our money).
>
> There are two potentially competing demands here:
> a) To reach the maximum number of readers.
> b) To use one's native language.
>
> This is a hot issue in the case of minority languages. If
> someone were to send a message to this list in Welsh, for
> instance, the expected number of responses would probably be
> zero. Even sending the message bilingually (with an English
> translation) would be a little pointless, unless there was at
> least one other list member who would be able to respond in Welsh.
>
> > In any case, I have never seen any actual resolution on this list
> > about the language to use, and aside from us monolingual Americans,
> > most English speakers with any academic pretensions at all
> (ie most of
> > those on this list, I assume) can at least read in a couple of
> > non-English languages. In short, as far as I am concerned,
> at least,
> > people are welcome to contribute here in Spanish, French or German.
>
> At least in the case of Spanish, French, German, etc., there
> is a high probability that many people will at least be able
> to read that language, even if they then respond in English.
> But where do we draw the line? What about Dutch, Finnish, or
> Urdu? In practice, each person has to estimate the likely
> audience size for any given language. Since the primary
> criterion seems to be "maximum audience size", English will
> win every time.
>
> What this means for minority languages is that they will
> continue to be squeezed out of the domain of academic
> discourse. Even some state languages (Dutch, Finnish, etc)
> tend to be squeezed out as well. Although my native language
> is English, I am sorry to see this happen, and my
> professional efforts for many years have been bent towards
> helping to ensure that the Welsh language at least has a
> stake in speech and language technology. This is the reason I
> set up the ISCA Special Interest Group in "Speech And
> Language Technology for Minority Languages" (SALTMIL) - see
> http://isl.ntf.uni-lj.si/SALTMIL/
>
> On the other hand, if anyone sends a message to this list in
> French or German, I might attempt at least a simple reply in
> that language - and then continue in English! :-)
>
> Best regards
>
> Briony Williams
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 07 2006 - 21:17:24 MET