Technological Support For Endangered/Minority Languages

The rapid development of the computer and internet technology has made digital space an indispensable part of modern life. While the technological advancement has enabled more creative ways for documenting endangered and minority languages, such as the collaboration by trained native speakers (Villa 2002), the insufficient technological support still leaves members from such language communities with very limited digital space online. This is true for minority languages with traditional writing systems, such as the Plains Cree syllabary (Antonio Santos and Harrigan 2020), and the situation can only be worse for those without an established writing system, such as the Modern South Arabian Languages. In the context of the importance of technological support to minority languages, this paper describes the author’s personal experience with creating cross-platform keyboard layouts for Modern South Arabian Languages.

As a precious branch of the Semitic language family that survived to the present day, these minority languages lack official recognition and there has not been any conventional writing system for them until very recently (Watson et al. n.d.; Naumkin and Kogan 2015). In fact, long before the current the Unicode Standard, i.e., Version 13.0 of (The Unicode Consortium 2020), since no later than Version 4.0.1 (Aliprand et al. 2003, 473), all the special characters involved in the proposed Arabic-based orthography for the Modern South Arabian Languages have been incorporated. However, the corresponding input methods did not become available until a Mehri layout was released in Google’s Gboard app for Android devices only. To fill in the gap, the author created system keyboards for both Windows and MacOS platforms and a working iPhone keyboard should be available after the next update of the iOS app Keyman. Since “[a]ll people, even the illiterate or semiliterate, are empowered to become part of the information society more readily if they are able to use their own languages” (Pretorius and Bosch 2003, 57), it is hope that the products of this project can help promote the online presence to contribute to the revitalization of the Modern South Arabian Languages.