Digital Language Diversity: Seeking the Value Proposition

This paper is a response to the CCURL workshop call for discussion about issues pertaining to the creation of an Alliance for Digital Language Diversity. As a global project, Kamusi has been building collaborative relationships with numerous organizations, becoming more familiar than most with global activities and the global funding situation for less-resourced languages. This paper reviews the experiences of many involved with creating or using digital resources for diverse languages, with an analysis of who finds such resources important, who does not, what brings such resources into existence, and what the barriers are to the wider development of inclusive language technology. It is seen that practitioners face obstacles to maximizing the effects of their own work and gaining from the advances of others due to a funding environment that does not recognize the value of linguistic resources for diverse languages, as either a social or economic good. Proposed solutions include the normalization of the expectation that digital services will be available in major local languages, international legal requirements for language provision on par with European regulations, involvement of speaker communities in the guided production of open linguistic resources, and the formation of a research consortium that can together build a common linguistic data infrastructure.