Measuring the Digital Language Divide (2023)
In the era of the Internet and global communications, immeasurable amounts of digital information are being created, shared and consumed. From emails, SMS text messages and social media, through to e-books, websites and audio & video streaming, we are connected to each other and also to the products & services we need in our daily lives. For billions of people, this means instant 24/7 access to health information, education, career opportunities, news, social interaction, entertainment, communication tools and digital content of every conceivable kind.
Although many people can access such information in their first language (their ‘mother tongue’), digital equality does not exist across all of the world’s living languages. In similar fashion to the natural kingdom, where plant and animal species range from abundant to endangered, languages are also classified stronger or weaker using different scales. From a traditional viewpoint (‘real world’ usage), language strength is often classified using the 13-point Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale ('EGIDS'). From a technological perspective (‘digital world’ usage), it is illustrated using the 6-point global Digital Language Support scale (‘DLS’).
The strongest digital languages are classified as Supported, broadly signifying a language is thriving digitally, including advanced features such as voice recognition, artificial intelligence, machine translation and voice assistants. In the middle are languages with Partial Support, which might feature some form of digital encoding (e.g. fonts, keyboards), spell checking and a variety of content in digital forms. The weakest digital languages are classified as Unsupported, broadly signifying there is no hardware, no software and no digital presence of any kind. Simply put, less than 1% of living languages are Supported, compared to around 53% of the world’s living languages offer Partial Support, and around 46% being Unsupported.
For these Unsupported ‘non-digital languages’, there is no hardware or software support (e.g., no keyboards, no operating systems, no fonts), without which there is no content of any kind. For speakers, readers and signers of these languages, there is no access to information & communication or products & services, and they’re forced to operate in a different language or face exclusion from vital access to digital language content. In the era of the Internet, smart phones, PCs and global media, over 3,277 languages simply do not exist in digital terms!
The gap between those languages with full digital support (Supported) and those without full digital support (Partial Support + Unsupported) is often referred to as the Digital Language Divide. At this point in time, this means 54% of the world’s population suffers from limited access to (or no access to) to, digital language technologies. Of course, many of these ‘digitally weaker’ languages are also endangered and, arguably, without digital capabilities, these languages are at an even greater risk of extinction.