[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.

[eropple]

> that, to me, is not political, but as raised previously, financial

The idea that there is a difference between these two things is one of the more pernicious ones of the last hundred years.

Money is power. The exercise of power is politics. They can't be separated.

[monocasa]

> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

It certainly sounds like this is a political situation to me, almost to a tautology. The fact that these decisions was made on the basis of financial gain doesn't make them any less political.

[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.