And here I thought the federal governments of Canada and Belgium had problems. What about government communicators that have to reach out to distinct minority communities? From the World Bank’s Private Sector Development blog:

“It is well known that out of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, only a tiny percentage is represented on the web. Perhaps less intuitive are the factors that preclude multilingual digitization of content.  They range from the problems of recognition of minority languages, the lack of local language computing capacity, through the plethora of internet governing bodies involved in encryption projects, to the lack of interface between linguistic and IT expertise …

As the president of the African Academy of Languages noted, isn’t it ironic that Africa, home to an incredible linguistic diversity, is still conventionally categorized into English, Spanish, French or Portuguese speaking - the languages of the colonizers?”

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