[neartheplain]

Whoah, 6.5 million native speakers! That's several orders of magnitude more than I was expecting. It's also significantly larger than the native-speaking populations of languages like Catalan, Basque, or Romansh, which might be more familiar to North Americans or Europeans.

[kspacewalk2]

There are a number of Native American languages that have numerous speakers, but until recently have been marginalized, repressed and ignored (and some to this day). Guarani is the most numerous, but also Quechua, Nahuatl, and the various Mayan languages (spoken by around half of Guatemalans, and another 2.5 million Mexicans).

[klipt]

I am shocked, shocked to learn that countries identifying as Latin America suppress non-Latin derived languages!

[jacobolus]

This is a very weird statement.

The problem is not the Spanish language. The problem is a colonial peasant economy/society that turned into a post-colonial peasant society, with land-owning quasi-nobility ruling over disempowered (in this case, indigenous) laborers and freely exercising their power to steal, rape, kill, etc., without penalty; it is a situation more or less comparable to peasant societies around the world and throughout history, which are always very exploitative and often racist.

Working class Spanish speakers living in towns were in many ways also economically exploited, but considered “better than indigenous people” to be a core part of their identities, and also felt free to beat them, steal from them, etc. where they found the opportunity. It’s a situation broadly comparable to race relations in the US south, where poor whites considered “better than blacks” to be a defining part of their identity.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the history of exploitation of indigenous communities, and the way indigenous people were shut out of many social and economic activities, led to the preservation of native languages.

[djoldman]

Or, 20x more than Icelandic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language

[hkt]

Without wishing to get political, is the difference that Iceland is a country but Guarani speakers don't have a nation-state of their own? Or something else?

[arp242]

Note that Icelandic is currently not well supported either ("In progress" with 384/5000 sentences and 86% Localized). Actually, Guaraní is better supported at the moment, and quite a number of other common smaller-ish languages aren't well supported yet either such as Hebrew, Danish, and even Korean (which is not small or even small-ish at all). Some other smaller languages are, such as Breton or Irish. Overall, it's a bit inconsistent. I suppose that this is because in the end, these things depend on the number of people contributing; there's a reason Esperanto is near the top, as it has a very active community of enthusiasts who love to promote the language.

[ftyers]

It takes about a week to get the interface translated and to start collection, for any language with at least 5000 sentences in the public domain. I helped bootstrap Guarani and Breton and a few other languages spoken by friends of mine, but in the end, it just takes one or two people. I think in general there is a big difference in engagement if STT/ASR already exists for the language (e.g. Hebrew, Danish and Korean) and if it doesn't exist at all.

[chudi]

It's an official language of Paraguay

[rudyfink]

In case anyone else wanted to know more, there are, apparently, 2 official languages and the other is Spanish. https://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/pa00000_.html#A140_

[interactivecode]

The difference is completely and inherently political.

[caymanjim]

I think this is overly dismissive of other factors. Whether or not a language is supported by something on the Internet has a lot more to do with financial incentives than politics. If there were a huge consumer market clamoring to give their money to a site and the only barrier were language, it'd get exploited pretty quickly.

[bedobi]

This is superficially correct, also completely disingenuous.

The reason why there isn't a huge consumer market for indigenous languages is because they're overwhelmingly systematically unsupported by their respective governments in favor of the non-indigenous colonial languages.

To be clear, that's not Mozilla's fault, and not something they or other random organizations can fix, but as human beings we should all be happy and give credit to those organizations that do their small part.

[majewsky]

I don't think that's the entire picture. I live near a part of East Germany that has a minority language community, the Sorbs. Unlike the language communities that you seem to be thinking off, the Sorbian language is actively supported by the government. Protection of Sorbian language and culture is enshrined in the state constitution. All the street signs are bilingual. Sorbian is being taught at school to everyone who wants to learn it.

Yet I have never seen an application that had a Sorbian translation, for one simple reason: Every Sorb also speaks German, so there is no financial incentive to invest in a Sorbian translation. The only things with Sorbian translations are those produced in the local area, e.g. the websites of local governments or local businesses.

[runarberg]

No it has a lot to do with politics as well. A sovereign nation may find it important to have their languages supported widely on the internet so they might use some of the public funds into funding translation efforts and voice recognition/speech synthesizer contributions.

I know the Icelandic government spends some money for this and it shows. This tiny language has way more support then other way more spoken languages. If the Norwegian government wanted I bet the Sámi languages could have just as good of a support as Icelandic. Or if the Greenlandic government had more funds available I bet we would see Kalaallisut in more places online.

[necovek]

What you are saying is that a small, relatively rich country can invest in supporting their own language: that, to me, is not political, but as raised previously, financial. It's also a good incentive for other big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple) to invest in a language that has prospective customers willing to spend more.

Serbian government would certainly support Serbian language voice recognition and synthesis, but probably not with as much money as Iceland would.

[ftyers]

The Norwegian government and Sámi parliament put a lot of effort into language technology for the Sámo languages. A big problem is lack of openness in platform support. E.g. Google and Apple make it very difficult for external developers to do localisation.

[air7]

Like any feature, perhaps it has to do with the volume of anticpated use vs the effort to support.

[moron4hire]

Nation-states are political entities, so choosing languages by such a distinction would absolutely be political.

[singlow]

I'm sure having a nation-state is a major factor, but I bet it also has to do with the average wealth, geographic location, historical alliances. However, I'd put my money on skin color as the biggest factor.

[runarberg]

As an example in favor of your conclusion, I propose Greenlandic. Geographically really close to Iceland, is the sole official language of an autonomous country, significant cultural heritage (with even a famous [possible] dwarf planet named after one of their historic gods). However—unlike Iceland—Greenland is not a wealthy country, and tend to have darker skin color then Icelanders.

[puchatek]

Autonomous territory, not a country.

[runarberg]

You are being overly pedantic. Country is not a strictly defined term. Sometimes it is used as you imply here as sovereign states which Greenland is not, but often it is used for other political entities as well. E.g. you often hear people speak of Puerto Rico as a country, and you also hear people from the UK pride them self that they are a country of countries (the former singular “country” meaning sovereign states, and the latter plural “countries” something else).

If the UK is a country of countries then Greenland is most certainly an autonomous country. The Wikipedia article for Greenland has the word “country” mentioned 14 times, so I’m certainly not the only using the term this way.

[andrepd]

>It is one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population is monolingual.

Wow, I had no idea

[victorlf]

Catalan has about 10 million speakers.

[pimterry]

In total, yes, but only about 4 million _native_ speakers.