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by runarberg 1775 days ago
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.
2 comments
necovek 1775 days ago
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.

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eropple 1775 days ago
> 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.

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monocasa 1775 days ago
> 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.

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ftyers 1775 days ago
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.
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