Rising Voices: Listening to the world on its own terms – an update from the Global Voices summit in Nepal

A MASSIVE part of Global Voices is the Rising Voices program led by Eddie Avila. As he puts it, Rising Voice is about “helping communities meet their self-determined needs” – often this means preserving languages and ensuring they thrive in digital spaces. 20 language activists take the stage in Nepal at the 2024 Global Voices Summit to talk about language promotion efforts.

Preserving a language has multiple elements. It’s about ensuring that scripts are digitized, so that we can read and write a language online – this might include scanning and digitizing analog books, as well as designing contemporary fonts. (In one case, it means a calligraphy festival – Callijatra – to celebrate the calligraphy of Nepal’s languages.)

20 activists, 20 languages at the GV Summit

But preserving a language also means ensuring it’s used in modern times. A popular way of doing this is building a Wikipedia edition. We meet a volunteer with the Doteli Wikipedia, which has been underway since 2014. It was founded by a volunteer who wasn’t from the region where the language was spoken, but wanted to ensure the language survived. Now there is a Doteli speaker running the project, and as of 2017, it’s been a standalone Wikipedia project. There’s a digital dictionary for the language as well.

These challenges are not to be underestimated – there’s not a single, agreed upon script for Doteli. And volunteers in the project speak different dialects of the language. They’ve decided to solve the problem in action: let’s work together and see what emerges.

Another approach for linguistic survival is seeking a language’s presence in Google Translate. We hear from an organizer who’s worked to create enough of a corpus in Nepalbhasa, a language spoken by the Newar people, which has been threatened since Nepali has emerged as the dominant language in the country and particularly in the Kathmandu Valley. Much like creating a Wikipedia, a Google Translate instance is a way of ensuring a language is “on the map” globally, and offers infrastructure to ensure learners and less-experienced speakers can connect with content.

Much of the work Rising Voices has done over the years is with communities in Mexico, Central and South America, areas where indigenous languages are threatened by the emergence of Spanish as a regional language. Abisag “Abi” Aguilar from Quintana Roo, who is studying to be an elementary school teacher, makes TikTok and Instagram videos about traditional sweets and medicines in the Yucatec Mayan language. This work brings Mayan language into online spaces and is complemented by local arts and crafts workshops which create environments for children to learn about their culture and create environments where children feel safe speaking their languages.

Genner Llanes-Ortiz at the Global Voices 2024 summit in Kathmandu, Nepal

Professor Genner Llanes-Ortiz has been working with Global Voices in partnership with UNESCO to create “Iniciativas digitales para lenguas Indigenas” – digital initiatives for indigenous languages – a toolkit in Spanish and English to help people preserve and promote their languages. The toolkit is the result of work since 2014, including annual meetings in Mexico which bring together indigenous language speakers to build a structure for protecting languages:

Facilitar (Facilitate) Multiplicar (Expand) Normalizar (Normalize) Educar (Educate) Recuperar (Recover) Imaginar (Imagine) Defender (Defend) Proteger (Protect)

Within a framework like this, Genner showcases efforts like a First Languages map in Australia, culturally appropriate emojis and comics that celebrate local languages and cultures.

Our session closes with activists speaking their local languages, with explanations of why it’s so important to speak their language. (A screen behind the participants offers translation of their words). Here are some excerpts:

Amrit Sufi, speaking in Angika: “I see a future in which the new generation doesn’t feel inferior about speaking Angika and carries it forward joyfully.”

Janak Bhatta, speaking in Doteli – “Death of a language leads to the death of literature, culture and civilization. It is the death of heritage… Forgetting your mother language is like drowning and disappearing.”

Sadik Shahadu, speaking in Dagbani – I hope to see significant improvements for Dagbani in Machine learning applications, natural language processing (NLP) and language AI such as Google translate and chatGPT.

Umasoye Igwe, speaking in Ekpeye – “I want to see my language being used by all members of my community as the primary language of communication offline and online.”

Siya Masuku, speaking in isiZulu – “In my context as a graphic novelist working in isiZulu, I would like to create stories that can be adapted from print to film, empower amaZulu to take ownership of their language revitalization efforts, and collaborate with other indigenous language communities to create language education programs and materials, research and academia.”

Subhashish Panigrahi, speaking in Balesoria-Odia “To use digital tools for your language, social media is a great starting point because it helps you connect with the community, particularly the youth.”

I am periodically reminded how Global Voices has grown and evolved since Rebecca MacKinnon and I tried to feature blogs from outside the US to tech-savvy audiences in American academe and journalism communities. We focused on making other conversations visible to English-speaking audiences, sometimes translating, but always featuring work in English. It wasn’t Until Portnoy Zheng started translating stories from Global Voices that we even discussed other language editions of the site.

Now Global Voices Lingua publishes dozens of editions of the site in different languages, and we offer fair trade translation services that are used by many leaders in the open source and international development communities. Many GV authors write in their native language and have their words translated into English, French, Spanish or other global languages. And the work of Rising Voices means that our community is not just reaching Japanese and Russian, but Doteli and Dagbani.

Eddie’s work is probably the furthest from any work I’ve personally done on Global Voices – I am working hard to get better at Spanish and learn enough French to navigate my frequent visits to friends at Sciences Po in Paris. But I am absolutely convinced that the work Eddie and Rising Voices are doing to preserve and promote multilingualism online is some of the most important work to ever have come from our community.

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