Local languages in the web : a warning
OBDILCI has open a new chapter is to draw lessons from the MECILDI V1 experience, both in terms of results and implications for V2. A new page will be created to document the technical reports resulting from this analysis.
The first technical report is titled “The Desert Web of Indigenous, Vernacular, Local, and Minority Languages“, and it sounds the alarm about the extremely marginal presence of these languages on the web—even in contexts, countries, or regions where they represent the majority of speakers.
After several decades of international talks about the importance and priority for public policies in order to foster local contents, the results are, more than disappointing, critical.
Check the results for the gTLD .africa, a successful endeavor with more than 30 000 sub-domains, which measurement has followed this report and unfortunately confirmed the trends, with the following measured data:
| %PAGES | %SITES | |
| Arabic | 1.19% | 1.78% |
| Swahili | 0.77% | 1.15% |
| Afrikaans | 0.34% | 0.51% |
| Zulu | 0.17% | 0.25% |
| Hausa | 0.16% | 0.24% |
| Amharic | 0.14% | 0.21% |
| Xhosa | 0.10% | 0.15% |
| Yoruba | 0.10% | 0.15% |
| Igbo | 0.09% | 0.14% |
| Kinyarwanda | 0.09% | 0.14% |
| Oromo | 0.06% | 0.08% |
| Somali | 0.06% | 0.08% |
| Southern Sotho | 0.05% | 0.07% |
| Swati | 0.05% | 0.07% |
| Tswana | 0.05% | 0.07% |
| Lingala | 0.04% | 0.06% |
| Tsonga | 0.04% | 0.06% |
| Venda | 0.04% | 0.06% |
| Ganda | 0.03% | 0.04% |
| South Ndebele | 0.03% | 0.04% |
| Rundi | 0.03% | 0.04% |
| Wolof | 0.03% | 0.04% |
| Malagasy | 0.02% | 0.03% |
| Shona | 0.02% | 0.03% |
| Tigrinya | 0.02% | 0.03% |