DLD Project

Digital Language Death Project

The objective of the DLD project is the completion of a new study about the systematic evaluation of the potential risks for all existing languages to be left aside in the process to obtain digital existence.

The study will retake, and potentially enhance, the method used by Andras Kornai in his first seminal study published in 2013, Digital language death,  PloS one 8 (10), e77056.

The method stands on a software he created to crawl a series of existing websites holding key information for most of the languages of the world, in regard to their EGIDS status and/or digital status. This software produces as output a matrix with all languages in the world (actually 8426) and a set of 91 attributes (collected from the crawling operation) which allowed the diagnostic made by the paper of the risk of digital death of the majority of them.

A consortium has been set up to reach the objective, with:

• HUN-REN INSTITUTE FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE AND CONTROL, scientific coordinator
• Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Software Development coordinator and future Responsible for Maintenance of the software
• UNESCO Chair on Language Policies for Multilingualism, in charge of new avenues of researches from the result of the project
• OBDILCI General Coordinator