At 14:19 09/11/2008, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
Just a quick addition to the comprehensive post of Vittorio. In Italy we have also other languages, like Furlan, spoken in the North-East, that, while not taught is schools or recognized officially in the administration, have an entry in the ISO table of languages. Also, the different treatment of the populations who speak French, German or Slovenian vs. those who speak Piemonteis, Furlan, and others, is that the former communities had a sovereign country to back up the population, and it became therefore a matter for international treaties, while the latter were left at the mercy of the Italian Government, who could decide alone, without any challenger.
Roberto, there is an European Commissary to Multilingualism and an international standardisation organisation (ISO), dealing with language compilation at government level, where ICANN belong (ISO 3166). Its extensions on a local level are at work. France for example has 26 "Langues de France" we want to protect. Europe has scores of languages to be developped on the Internet. This is probably the most crucial issue today for the world, Internet and development stability: internationalisation (the support of languages as a localisation of an internationalised Internet) vs. multilingualisation (the support of every script and language as English ASCII today, you can also define as a localised internationalisation). It is crucial because a proper multilingual Internet calls for a complete Internet, able to support multilaterality in many other areas (i.e. the missing OSI layers) and the semantic strata. The recent ITU Chair's position look is simple to read: either IETF develops the multilateral network systemic we need, or the ITU will do it. I am afraid this is very bad new, but very realistic. The real constraints are : - the US Industry interest in rationalising the Internet languistic support (RFC 4645, 4646 and 4647 about language tags, language tags filtering, etc. and their dangers) and limiting them to 150 through locale files support and Search Engines. - the IETF lack of vision in similarly rationalizing IDNs (where Search Engine people are the leaders). - the "Internet of the Rich" now promoted by ICANN - the control of the IANA as the control of the Internet Governance. FLO efforts for the "People Internet" have : (0) engaged into a two year community test-bed conforming with ICANN-ICP-3 requirements over the virtual root and DNS issues, making sure that the IANA is not the core of a distributed (i.e. multilateral) Internet and not worth the attention ICANN and Unicode pay to it. (1) fought to made these RFCs clear enough to be interoperable with other open solutions (2) blocked an Anglo-Saxon Govs supported (UK, IE, US) proposition to "rationalize" the ISO 3166 standard which protects multilingualism (3) taken over the maintenance of the only existing database of more than 20.000 language names and related information which was used in part by ISO for its delayed exhaustive standard (4) introduced the ccTAG multilingual sorting solution (5) different universal fount systems under achievement to permit a secure (police, banks, customs, databases) universal character system (6) are trying to fix with IESG and IAB a formal way to permit a participation of the Internet lead users into the Internet standardization process so an IDNA interoperable and semantic addressing oriented ML-DNS can be documented. (7) started a project to collect, maintain and support new information, communication and services technologies multilingual glossary (8) initiated multilniguistics as the concept of a discipline supporting the diversity of the languages, independently from the languages themselves. With a first meeting in Paris last June (Multilinguistica 2008). (9) work on a simple TLD Registry management system for current ccTLDs and cominng gcTLDs (geocultural) to be easily deployed and maintained by a single person under Windows or Linux. (10) etc. (and as you know there are big political things in this etc. ). jfc