[runarberg]

As an Icelander I am always really impressed with how well my language—a language spoken by a few hundred thousand people worldwide—is supported on various platforms and technologies. This is probably in no small part thanks to active participation by native speakers and even some government funding.

However I at the same time I’m also deeply disappointed by the lack of support for Iceland’s closest neighbour’s language—Greenlandic—which is an indigenous language, the sole official language of an autonomous country.

[matsemann]

I saw the same when I was younger for Norwegian. Bokmål is the most commonly written form of Norwegian, but New Norwegian is used by about ~15%. Most software included Bokmål support, but you could bet some hardcore user of New Norwegian had made a language pack available as well.

[necovek]

Ah, I remember "Nynorsk" (sorry for the bad spelling and ASCIIation) localisation of GNOME from early 2000s!

Generally, it takes only a few dedicated people to get software localised if good enough infrastructure is provided by the community!

I hope that's what we see with Mozilla Common Voice too!

[Sharlin]

"Nynorsk" is correct, no non-ASCII shenanigans in that word :)

[jpetso]

For Mozilla Common Voice, it looks like even Bokmål isn't listed as dataset yet. Language packs have the advantage that a single dedicated user can come up with the entire thing, but for voice collections you need a large variety of different people and ideally tons of them. For any language with a small native speaker population, even a rich one like Norway and especially a fractional subset like Nynorsk, getting enough speakers to participate in open source collection efforts will remain a challenge. Purportedly, even for commercial companies it's hard to find enough Norwegians willing to speak a few sentences for a nominal payment unlike most other countries.

Luckily, speech recognition research is making some good progress on dealing with low-resource languages so hopefully we'll see some acceptable models made from the little available open data that's out there.

[simongray]

> However I at the same time I’m also deeply disappointed by the lack of support for Iceland’s closest neighbour’s language—Greenlandic—which is an indigenous language, the sole official language of an autonomous country.

I'm not sure "autonomous country" is an accurate description of what Greenland is. It is - for all intents and purposes - a devolved region of Denmark. It is still way too reliant on economic aid to be able to be independent and, honestly, probably couldn't exist as a developed nation without a patron (Denmark) or without selling its land/resources to a great power (USA, China). And the population is only 1/6 the size of Iceland's and is very dispersed on a massive arctic island, with most people living in tiny isolated villages by the coast.

With that in mind, you wouldn't expect great language support unless the Danish state steps in and spends some serious dough on it. I actually work on Danish language technology at the University of Copenhagen and let me tell you something... the Danish state hardly spends any money on Danish language resources either. We envy the kind of funding that researchers in countries like Iceland and Norway have access too.

[runarberg]

> the Danish state hardly spends any money on Danish language resources either.

I’m actually a little disappointed that there is not more collaboration between the language departments in Iceland and Greenland. Iceland does spend some money on foreign languages and there is much interest in general for foreign languages in Iceland. The former president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is a huge language buff and advocates for foreign languages a lot. So much so that the house of foreign languages at the University is named after her (https://vigdis.hi.is/).

It is generally believed in Iceland that setting up Icelandic cultural institutions in Reykjavík played a big part in our independence. Institutions such as the University, libraries and the National Theater. There is also big interest for Greenlandic independence in Iceland. Therefor it would make sense for a rich country like Iceland to spend some money in progressing the status of Kalaallisut, both in Iceland (by shared cultural events), Greenland (by help funding cultural institutions) and internationally (by help funding online language efforts).

[runarberg]

I’m writing this as a separate comment since it is an aside (i.e. not about investments in progressing indigenous languages online).

I don’t think it is wrong to call Greenland a country. As mentioned elsewhere, the word country is not strictly defined. Sometimes it means strictly independent nations, but most of the time it doesn’t. E.g. here is CIA calling Greenland a country (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/greenland/).