On 3/9/06, Nicholas Sanders <nick@semiotek.org> wrote:
> But the Polish and Icelandic examples don't fit the model,
> because they have no official status in the countries cited.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think *any* language has official
status in the United States. Does that mean we don't have any
minority (or majority) languages?
Still, you make a good point. A language that is clearly not a
minority language worldwide (e.g. Hindi) might well be a minority
language in a specific context. Thus complicating the terminology
still further.
On 3/8/06, Mike Maxwell <maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On this side of the Atlantic, the term seems to be "low density
> languages" ...
In my circle, the most common term might be "scarce-resource
languages". (We got tired of explaining to people that the meaning of
"low density" had nothing to do with density.) The term gets at the
idea that a language might be spoken by a lot of people, but still not
have a lot of computational resources available (e.g. Hindi, Urdu).
Cheers.
-- Ed Kenschaft ekenschaft@gmail.com www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/kensch/
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