Preserving endangered languages with Noto fonts
blog.google
blog.google
Android isn't getting updates to Noto fonts - and doesn't support font side-loading. So anyone who wants to communicate using an endangered language can't do so.
Judging by the issues backlog, it appears only a few people at Google work on this. Not enough to sustain it.
This is too important a project to be left to the whims of a Google product manager.
Just like any monopoly, they dominate and then abandon.
They could have funded an independent foundation, or sponsored existing teams, or paid an external agency.
Instead they made a big fanfare, got a lot of attention, and tried to make themselves the arbiter of what should receive attention.
I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for OSS Unicode typefaces and the stuff from before Noto looks to mostly be collections of other OSS typefaces. Maybe MPH 2B Damase had some independent funding? I can't tell. But if these efforts had significant funding it is not apparent from their output.
Based on the information I have available to me at this time, I can only conclude that the space of broad Unicode fonts is in a much better state now with Google's efforts on Noto than it would have been in the counterfactual where they did not make those efforts.
He's been developing the Aboriginal fonts for decades, when many people working on language documentation were only vaguely aware of Unicode. He was very responsive to projects I worked on and added characters into the private use areas whene Unicode hadn't defined characters yet. This allowed school children as well as researchers to use orthographies they wouldn't otherwise be able to use electronically. Many language documentation projects have relied on his work.
The Noto fonts are nice but kind of late comers. Google has a history of making a brief noise about endangered language projects before abandoning them. This site was originally a Google project that was abandoned for years:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
The characterization on the site is that Google always intended to hand it off but the reality is that there was a big noise made by the company and then nothing more than an essentially empty web site sitting there for years until it was taken over by other groups.
Fonts don't go away but I would be very weary of trusting Google with data as important as endangered language documentation. You never know when they'll turn out the lights. They'd do a lot more good by helping to fund and support existing projects that have demonstrated long term commitments.
Even if you consider just the need to make the written language available on computers, there are other efforts. SIL is one organization that has developed fonts for minority (including endangered) languages for decades: https://software.sil.org/fonts/. They're part of a Christian missionary organization, hence their interest. But they make the fonts freely available to everyone, indeed their license is commonly used for free fonts.
Besides fonts, if you want to use a language on a computer, you probably need a keyboard mapper. For languages for which a standard keyboard hasn't been developed, Keyman (https://keyman.com) is often used.
And of course there's the need to develop a writing system--a mapping from sound to characters--in the first place, a task which has not yet been done for many languages, and which is far from trivial for most languages. The linguistic study called phonology is a first step in developing an orthography. And then you have to train people to use the orthography; writing does't come automatically.
Google has not always given the Noto team enough resources the last few years but they have been working hard to keep up with things and hopefully this investment in the structure of the project will give it more chance of staying alive for years to come!
What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive?
Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries?
Welsh is looking pretty stable after a deliberate effort. Whereas Irish had more speakers but is now more endangered. So I think it's more a function of how much people want - or don't want - to keep a language alive, than just of number of people.
IIRC: Losing its distinctive grammatical features; becoming much closer to Swedish, and also adopting large numbers of loanwords from English.
> Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago?
I've read that grammatical irregularities are being (slowly) flattened out, so in a limited sense yes.
This also affects written communication. Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly. They could, if they put in hundreds of hours of study, but in practice they don't. English hasn't changed very much over the last 100 years, I'd claim, compared with many other languages, but it's hard to measure that objectively. To start off with, what do I really mean by "English"? I suppose I mean the standard written language rather than colloquial forms...
One could perhaps also argue that a language that has changed a lot recently can't have built up the vocabulary, connotations, and all the rest of the stuff that is required for high-quality, nuanced communication and is therefore likely to be a less precise means of communication even between people who are tracking the changes. But that's speculative and I don't know how you could measure it.
So, to conclude this waffle, I suspect it does make sense to talk about a language "degenerating", but it's very hard to be scientific about it.
For instance, most large languages in India are dying off quite rapidly even in regions with high speaker density, since the Indian state and people prefer a discriminatory class system that privileges a foreign language. There are very few opportunities for non-English speakers, either educationally or economically. Normal speech has turned into a crass pidgin of English and the local vernacular; schooling has turned 'English-medium' entirely, thus creating a generation of idiots, fluent neither in English nor in their own native languages.
The Indian state being essentially the same as the colonial British Raj, will never tolerate empowering the natives of India, even if political cronies have and will continue to give it a sense of legitimacy by appealing to ethno-religio-linguistic rabble rousing.
See, http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
On the contrary, small countries are the ones most likely to keep languages alive.
Consider Luxembourg: with less than a million population, they still have their own distinct official language, Luxembourgish (in addition to French and German). If you picked any Luxembourg-sized chunk of Europe and went back 200 years, you'd find a similar situation with a small community speaking a language as distinct as Luxembourgish is from other official languages in Europe.
But the formation of nation states with a centralized compulsory education system also meant compulsory instruction in a standard language, internal migration of people who only speak the standard language and not the local dialect and eventually mass media only available in the standard language. So by now, "one language per country" has become pretty much the norm, with only limited recognition for sub-national languages.
Even in Luxembourg, not everyone speaks Luxembourgish (Wikipedia says 50.9%, but that's suspiciously also the proportion whose nationality is Luxembourgish, suggesting some confusion between the two concepts). But if I had to choose whether Luxembourg or some random city in Germany is more likely to preserve a distinct language, I'd definitely bet on Luxembourg.
IMHO, the answer depends more on the lifestyle than on the number of speakers. As long as everyone lives in a homogenous community along with their grandparents and parents, the new generations learn the language. When people move to larger towns where the majority speaks a dominant language, their children at best speak the minority language at home while the grandchildren rarely acquire it at all, and its death is imminent. Anecdotal evidence follows.
* Manx. In 1874: 16,200 speakers (30% of the population of the Isle of Man); in 1974: last native speaker dies. [0]
* Belarusian. In 1999: 36.7% of Belarusian citizens spoke it at home; in 2009: 11.9%. [1] Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes.
* Lower Sorbian in Germany. In the 1880s: 70 thousand; in the 1990s: 7 thousand; around 2010: 2 thousand. Folk dances, costumes, and customs will outlast it like an empty shell outlasts its resident.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speake...
This happens somewhat often: people emigrate from a country/region, and the culture becomes 'frozen' with-in them at that time, while in the source location there is still change and evolution.
The large Italian diaspora in the New World often have dialects that died out from the Old Country because of mass communication:
> He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family.
* https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documen...
See also Endangered Languages Alliance (Toronto):