Thomas Benedikter | LIT Verlag, 2009 | Book
This book tried to map India’s linguistic minorities and its language policy in a multilingual state. It examines the rights of linguistic minorities against the march of modernization and the cultural homogenization of dominant languages supported by state policies.
K. David Harrison | National Geographic, 2010 | Book
This book is a moving account of the author’s travels around the globe to meet the last speakers of languages on the verge of extinction. Through interviews and photographs it focuses on the knowledge that is lost when a language disappears as well as the, often futile, attempts by its speakers to revitalize and teach the younger generation their mother tongue.
UNESCO | Explore
This is the website for a Language Technology for All conference organized by UNESCO in 2019 (the International Year for Indigenous Languages) where stakeholders — technologists, policy makers, and language community representatives gathered to discuss the challenges around making a multilingual internet and information access available to all, irrespective of the language they spoke. It has Video-on-demand of the various talks and presentations made during the conference.
| Explore
An amazing repository of research done on endangered languages, from anthropology to technology and from advocacy to culture.
Kentaro Toyama | PublicAffairs, 2015 | Book
The author of this book, after years of trying to build technology for “solving” social problems, puts forth a very convincing argument that “digital utopia” is unachievable, and any real social change has to come from the society, while technology can only serve to amplify human effort.
Basil Abraham, Danish Goel, Divya Siddarth, Kalika Bali, et al. | European Language Resources Association, 2020 | Article
This paper presents a case study of collecting language resources for Gondi, a tribal language, and how a community centric approach can help not only the development of technology but also other resources such as story books for children, dictionary, news and other information access applications for the use of the community.
NLP with Friends | 2020 | Watch
This is a video of a talk on a paper presented last year on “The state and fate of linguistic diversity in the NLP world” which presents quantitative analyses to show the disparity in the languages of the world in language resources and research and its consequences. They also discuss some of the ways in which this gap in access to language technology can be reduced.