Rico's rants: Do U Spk Txt?

Tina Rosenberg has an article in The New York Times about texting in other than English:

When Ibrahima Traore takes his sons to a park in Montclair, New Jersey, he often sits on a bench and reads. He reads English, French and Arabic, but most of the time he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers of those languages would recognize. N’Ko is the standardized writing system for Mande languages, a family of closely related tongues — among them Traore’s language of Mandinka, but also Jula, Bamana, Koyaga, Marka — spoken, for the most part, in eight West African countries, by some 35 million people. N’Ko looks like a cross between Arabic and ancient Norse runes, written from right to left in a blocky script with the letters connected underneath. Traore types e-mail to his family on his laptop in N’Ko, works on his website in N’Ko, tweets in N’Ko on his iPhone and iPad and reads books and newspapers written in N’Ko to prepare for the N’Ko classes he teaches in the Bronx and for his appearances on an Internet radio program to discuss cultural issues around the use of N’Ko.
For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language. For those who lived at the intersection of modern technology and traditional cultures, the problem was even worse. “For a long time, technology was the enemy,” says Inée Slaughter, executive director of the New Mexico-based Indigenous Language Institute, which teaches Native Americans and other indigenous peoples how to use digital technologies to keep their languages vital. Heritage languages were being killed off by increasing urbanization, the spread of formal education and the shift to cash crops, which ended the isolation of indigenous communities. Advances in technology seemed to intensify the decline. “Even in 1999 or 2000, people were saying technology killed their language,” Slaughter says. “Community elders worried about it. As television came into homes, English became pervasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, huge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know ways technology can be helpful.”
For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline.
When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use for several years. But, growing up, he did not know it existed. At age six, he was sent from his village of Kiniebakoro in rural Guinea to live with a brother in the Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and write in French, the language taught in school in both countries. He never saw a book, newspaper, medicine label, store name or street sign in N’Ko.
And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers like Traore to read and write in the languages they spoke at home. In 1943, Solomana Kante, a teacher’s son who worked as a merchant in the Ivory Coast, resolved to develop a written form for the Mande language family. (N’Ko means “I say” in Manden languages; speakers of Manden languages can typically understand one another, even if they don’t use all the same words for the same things.) He tried using the Arabic alphabet, then the Roman alphabet, but found that neither one could express the tonal variations of spoken Manden languages. So in 1949, he invented his own script, one flexible enough to capture any Manden language in writing. Among the first books he translated into N’Ko was the Quran. He later compiled a history of Manden languages and culture.
At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two typewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters. (He was given another one by the president of Guinea, according to a Guinean newspaper.) “If there was a typewriter, ink and ribbons were hard to find,” says Baba Mamadi Diané, a student of Kante’s who now teaches N’Ko at Cairo University. Almost all of the books and papers in N’Ko in Guinea were copied by hand by Kante’s students, like medieval monks, but with several sheets of carbon paper below.
Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko seemed destined to remain a code used by an elite. Then came the digital revolution.
Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new life thanks to technology. An internet discussion group, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is full of announcements for new software to build sound dictionaries and a project to collect tweets in Tok Pisin, a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El Salvador. “It’s the amplification of Grandma’s voice,” Slaughter says.
Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by six-year-olds. And what makes a six-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. “Language is driven from the ground up,” says Don Thornton, a software developer in Las Vegas who specializes in making video games and mobile apps in Native American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you have a million speakers, if your kids aren’t learning, you’re in big trouble.”
Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlikely to be passed on to the next generation. Thornton, who has worked with more than a hundred Native American tribes, says that some are already using sophisticated programs to preserve their languages. “Other groups,” he says, “we ask about their language program, and they say, ‘You’re it.’ We look at it from their standpoint: what are the coolest technologies out there? We start programming for that.”
For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. “You find people like him everywhere,” Harrison said. “We are getting languages where the first writing is not the translation of the Bible, as it has often happened, but text messages.”
Traore, who left Guinea for New York in November of 1988, did not discover N’Ko until a 2007 trip to visit his parents in his native village. When his wife, Greta, a software developer, went into his brother’s room, she noticed books in N’Ko on his shelves. Puzzled, she called her husband in. “You said your language was not written. So what are these books?” Traore was shocked. (He and Traore did not grow up together.) When he came back to New York, he googled N’Ko. “That was the big wow,” he said. He found a teacher in Queens. “When I listened to the alphabet, I listened to our history. Now I can read the same words my mother would say to me.”
N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into the digital age two decades ago. In the early 1990s, Diané, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when he was approached by an employee. “Why are you killing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know about DOS?” The employee explained to Diané that, using computer software, he could write a new script and generate as many copies as he wished. Together with information-technology experts at Cairo University, Diané developed a rudimentary font to use on his own computer. But creating a font that anyone could use was a much more complicated task.
First, it meant getting N’Ko into Unicode— the international standard that assigns a unique number to each character in a given writing system. Then Microsoft picked up N’Ko for its local language program— sort of. N’Ko was included in Windows 7, but the ligatures were misaligned, and the letters were not linked from below as they should have been. “The original plan was to fully support it, but we just didn’t have the resources,” said Peter Constable, a senior program manager at Microsoft. For Windows 8, which is still being tested, Microsoft has fixed the problem. Most writers of N’Ko download the font for use with Open Office’s Graphite program, developed by SIL International, a Christian group with an interest in seeing the Bible reach every hut and yurt on the planet.
Digital technology has already transformed how Traore communicates with his family. When his father died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news of the death to cousins in the Ivory Coast by going to the bus station and looking for a passenger heading toward their city; the cousins then mailed a letter to Traore in New York. It took two months. Now communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Traore sends an email in N’Ko. His nephew, who works in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his email at the town’s internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter, and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He asks someone on the boat to take the letter to the Traore family.
For Traore and others, the most pressing reason for making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that only a small percentage of Guineans can read and write. The United Nations puts the rate of adult literacy at forty percent, but that figure counts mostly those who live in major cities; in rural areas, it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is often conducted in the open air with no chairs, perhaps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discouraging to students, it takes place in French, a language they don’t speak at home.
“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko literacy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fellow N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of informal schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time, N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in an official school; the pilot program will be in Kiniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.
People had been working on breathing life into N’Ko for years, but they found out about one another only when they began to put up N’Ko websites. There is Traore’s site, kouroussaba.com, Diané’s kanjamadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Doumbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engineer in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called the N’Ko Institute of America. Diané’s students in Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko. Among the first was a season of the television show 24.
If you have an iPhone, tweeting and emailing in N’Ko is now easy. Eatoni, a company based in Manhattan that has created software for cellphone keyboards in some three hundred languages, released an N’Ko app earlier this year. The iPhone keyboard app works on the iPad too. Eatoni’s CEO, Howard Gutowitz, developed it after months of tests and advice from Traore, Diané, and other N’Ko users. But iPhones are too expensive to be widely used in rural Africa. Almost every African villager owns or aspires to own a conventional cellphone (equipped with only a number pad), even if he or she has to travel to town to charge it.
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. Nurses can send health information. People can do their banking. With airtime prohibitively expensive, texting is the preferred mode of communication. “Text messages would be a lifesaving tool for us in Guinea,” Traore said. He also says he believes that the ability to text in their own language would give people a powerful reason to learn to read. “Before, men in my village used to brag about their wristwatches,” Traore said. “Now they brag about their cellphones.” When he shows N’Ko speakers his iPhone and tells them, “This is your language,” they are dumbstruck. An N’Ko newspaper published in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, recently crowed: “Don’t look for N’Ko under a cabbage leaf any more. It’s on the iPhone now.”
Those old cellphones don’t have apps, of course. You use the language the phone comes with; in West Africa, that is French. The market for an N’Ko phone would be, potentially, tens of millions of people. But getting manufacturers to add new alphabets to cellphones isn’t easy. Gutowitz has had a long and frustrating experience trying to do so. “Most manufacturers roll their eyes,” he said. “I spent a decade running around the world talking to cellphone manufacturers— everyone I could think of— saying, ‘Look, we can support a hundred languages, it’s a big market.’ They didn’t care. People say, ‘Why don’t you go talk to Nokia?’ I have talked to Nokia. Again and again and again.”
Lamine Dabo and Nouhan Sano, Guineans who live in Bangkok, where there is a prosperous and close-knit Guinean community, have had a similar experience. They have been trying to persuade manufacturers to develop an N’Ko cellphone since 2007. Dabo and Sano’s gem-importing businesses take them all over Asia, and all over Asia they bring their list of more than seventeen thousand N’Ko words. Dabo says it’s possible to build a cheap cellphone with N’Ko as its language, a camera, and slots for two SIM cards— a necessity in Africa, where reception is often spotty. When he went to Guinea and Mali to discuss the phone with distributors, he said, he was mobbed with interest. But his briefcase was filled with rejections from manufacturers. Some asked him to put up the money himself. “Everyone says it’s possible, but the money is not enough for them to make it a priority,” he said.
Dabo and Sano are still trying. It might seem strange that the fortunes of N’Ko and of indigenous languages around the world should depend on the ability to subtitle 24, to write with Windows and, above all, to text. But for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past.