0. Introduction
1. Learning Platforms In Lesser-Used Languages
2. Human Language Technology Developments
3. Information And Communication Technology: Regional Plans,
Computer Software and Internet Tools
4. Cultural Digital Resources and Linguistic Diversity
5. Convergence and Broadcasting
6. Electronic Publishing
0. INTRODUCTION
Many European minority language groups live in territories located in the periphery. Such locations are emerging out of a profound restructuring of the Old Economy with the various institutions, technologies and mentalities characteristic of that economy. At the same time the regional development instruments and mechanics available mainly derive from conceptions and contexts which are no longer in existence. Thus European peripheral regions are on the threshold of trying to establish a presence in the New Economy and the Digital Economy which derive from a context distinctive from that of industrial age economics. This distinctiveness involves institutional settings and technologies which relate to the regulatory frameworks that link with a global economy based on liberal trading and free markets. There are at least five implications for 'new regional development policy':
Policy has to engage with these conditions so that the transition from the Old Economy to the New Economy is facilitated, and must focus on developing structures that will insure the most effective management of firms and organisation within the New Economy.
We distinguish between the Old Economy/New Economy/Digital Economy. The New Economy involves developing the technology and organisational structures which allow companies in the Old Economy to operate effectively in the New Economy. The Digital Economy, on the other hand, involves exploiting the digital value chain in exploiting digital resources for both product development and for developing the technological capacity of regional companies. The Digital Economy focuses upon the developing of a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) which can serve as the basis for a Regional Innovation System. Regions which develop the digital value chain in partnership with other regions based on safeguarding their own digital assets will be most likely to succeed:
This means that technology is a capability as well as a commodity. Technological change needs to be integrated with with business organisation and production capabilities in order to better understand industrial change.
Developing the digital value chain is central to our perspective, but this development must become the focus of a regional innovation system (RIS). This involves networking all of the organisations relevant to innovation within the region so that all their knowledge flows freely in promoting innovation. Thus innovation is anchored by institutions which must be capable of anticipating development.
In pursuing such a goal, the strength of many minority language regions lies in the following features:
The task is one of transforming these developments into a coherent pilot project which explores the potential of developing a regional development policy constructed out of the centrality of the regional Digital Economy as a Regional Innovation System that is not only transferable to other regions, but which relies upon the networking of such systems across regions.
There are three components to such a system.
It is already evident that the 'death of distance' argument (Cairncross, 1997), which claimed that peripheralism would disappear through the advent of Information and Communication Technnology, is not operating; and that the main growth in the New Economy focuses on the cores of the Old Economy. Such developments often focus upon an infrastructure which includes the existence of large technology firms and the willingness of venture capital to enter such arenas. This does not augur well for most peripheral locations which lack this kind of infrastructure. This developmental emphasis suggests that the best way for peripheral regions to enter the New Economy is by focusing upon existing regional resources, and fast-tracking them into the activities which have a relevance for the New Economy. Language plays a not insignificant role in both the resources and the process of operation. Thus the Atlantis project was conceived of in terms of exploring how the entry of minority languages of Europe into the New Economy can be facilitated by reference to the preceding understanding of the process of economic restructuring. In pursuing this goal it was necessary to focus upon the key components of a benchmarking exercise that would establish the nature and context of current developments. It involved the following issues: Information and Communication Technology and learning, the development of regional technology plans, the convergence that derives from digitisation and how it is implemented, the development of human language technology and the exploitation of cultural digital resources that can be of relevance to the link between language and culture.
The concept of regional technology plans derives from the EC initiative referred to as RITS. These were meant to stimulate the development of regional initiatives by reference to the development of the technology associated with the transformation to the Information Society and the New Economy. In practice most of the outcomes of these initiatives involved little more than the opportunity for regional development agencies to draw together projects in a coherent way. Since then there has been further initiatives by DG-REGIO and also, as the understanding of the New Economy moved ahead so also did the involvement of regional authorities in such conceptions. The effectiveness of such developments is partly conditioned by the nature of the region in question. The historic regions which have a degree of political autonomy are better placed to develop coherent policy at the regional level than are those NUTS III regions which have drawn already existing authorities together in order to create an impact of scale in regional affairs.
Policy initiatives which address infra-structural factors, most notably the rolling out of broadband, have to be distinguished from those which have a more comprehensive goal of promoting the New Economy and the Information Society. This is not to imply that the two are somehow inherently separate but rather to emphasise how this topic is addressed by most authorities. Yet in another sense the development of coherent New Economy policies await the development of broadband facilities. Certainly it is the broadband issue which is most in evidence and some even imply that the issue is one of such general concern that it limits moving on to consider other issues.
The broadband issue is related to the opening up of competition in the telecommunications sector in 1998. This in turn was related to the general neo-liberal principles of free market operations. Consequently the roll out of broadband is subject to free market conditions and this is problematic for minority language groups located in the periphery or in sparsely populated areas, since it is these very areas which are being denied broadband access because of their inability to respond to free market principles associated with justifying an economy of scale for the providers. Recently there has been discussion within the Commission about using structural funds to limit the extension of this form of the digital divide (Financial Times 29/5/02).
Evidently it is the other side of the coin –(the policy interventions associated with exploiting the technological infrastructure), which has most to do with the integration of the various minority languages in planning for the New Economy. All regions will have institutions which are in the process of developing New Economy policies. The appropriate rhetoric certainly exists within such institutions. However,few appear to have a clear understanding of why the steps which are proposed have to be taken. These policies also relate to the sectional interests associated with those activities which will promote the information society –(learning, media. publishing, business activity etc.). In this respect it is not unlikely that the new policies will follow the interests and agents associated with Old Economy policy. Yet there are examples of some more comprehensive policy developments at the regional level. Some of these plans, especially those focusing upon knowledge management, refer to the Triple Alliance principles of regional development wherein the University, the private sector and the public sector develop partnerships within which the organisation and the function of each change.
Many of the activities associated with the exploitation of regional cultural resources will relate to these two components. Convergence affords the possibility of integrating what were previously separate information and entertainment systems. This integration allows new conceptions to emerge, conceptions which reconfigure the existing ways of representation and delivery. Thus there is ample room for both product and process innovation. Regions involved in convergence at an early stage should benefit considerably from exploiting the 'first to market' principle. Vast archives of cultural resources can be created once these non-digital materials are digitised and converted into the resources necessary for new product development. These two processes are not necessarily associated: memory institutions may well consider digitisation without understanding or considering the advantages of convergence except the new ways of doing things associated with the exploitation of a single channel–(the internet) that it affords.
The development of convergence appears to be influenced by a number of factors. Firstly, the size of the state population: smaller states find it difficult to develop a service which meets the need for a sizeable investment and yet conforms with free market principles. Secondly the relationship between supply and demand and how the pricing mechanism of such features as set-top boxes influencing how this relationship unwinds in influencing the development of digital broadcasting. Also relevant is how the state allocates its multiplexes and how this pertains to regions and language groups.
The advent of Information and Communication Technnology and convergence afford exciting new opportunities for learning: location and learning are no longer linked in a fixed fashion. However, distance learning is only one side of the coin. There will be new challenges associated with the nature of the New Economy and its relation with digital product development. There is a clear need to work on line across regions using human language technology as the basis for transcending language differences. This leads to new understanding of learning by doing: and pedagogy must change to meet the demands of the new learning. Furthermore the centrality of the link between information and knowledge for the knowledge economy means that tacit skills assume an importance that was not evident in Taylorist conceptions of working.
One of the evident assets that accrues to a minority language group involves the cultural resources that pertain to this language group. This of course also links to regional context and to the institutions which house these resources. Together with the broadcasting industry these institutions have a vast potential for the development of new digital products. Considerable investment is needed at the digitisation end of the value chain but less so at the production end. This can become the basis for the rapid transformation of peripheral region and the quick entry into the New economy.
This constitutes the rationale associated with the project. We now turn to present the main findings of the work that was undertaken. The presentation involves reference to the six primary headings which we explored and involves the 21 language groups which were investigated.
1. LEARNING PLATFORMS IN LESSER-USED LANGUAGES
All states are developing connectivity and establishing ICT as a basis for their educational systems. Those states which do acknowledge the relevance of minority languages for learning are not necessarily developing the tools and materials required for this to operate. However, this alone does not guarantee development.
One of the most popular arguments for introducing learning platforms is the element of cost-saving. On-line learning offers cost-saving contexts for small dispersed populations and can thus be of considerable value for numerous language groups. It is important to stress that this argument must be re-thought for two reasons in the context of minority groups: On the one hand, only large groups such as Catalans have the capacity to disseminate learning platforms to a large number of speakers – the condition necessary for cost-saving to be effective. On the other hand, most of the minorities do not have the resources – in terms of money, language corpora etc. – to develop sustainable learning platforms. Besides this we have to take in consideration recent research on developing learning platforms. There are two conditions essential for introducing high-end learning platforms: we must have a more or less stable content in terms of time and, as noted above, a sustainable number of users. Both conditions are not present in most cases of minority languages.
In conclusion we find a very heterogeneous situation among the minorities concerning learning platforms that could be divided into three main types:
These factors lead in the main to the following conclusions:
2. HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS
Human language technology research is a precondition for the development of a number of products which either already exist (spellchecks, e.g.) or will in the near future (voice recognition, etc.) become fairly standard in the main languages. Such research may be undertaken or commissioned by the larger telecommunications companies, by large university research centres, or with the financial support of the authorities. However, given the small demographic scale, and the lack of official status, many languages have little or no such research, and it will therefore be unlikely that they can compete in this field in the information society. From the data gathered, it is clear that a great deal of work has been done on Catalan and Basque, and some in Welsh, Galician and Gaelic, whereas some other languages have occasional projects and products. Even Ladin has a lexical database, though this is not on the net, but certainly nothing to compare with the morphological analyzer and generator that Catalan can boast (http://clic.fil.ub/demos/morfo/). What virtually all the language groups have are machine-readable dictionaries. In this field the Basques seem the most thorough, with lists of birds, of synonyms, psychology terms, proverbs, proper names, etc. The Basque Language Academy is active in the field (e.g. the multilingual place-name lists, http://www2.euskaltzaindia.net/Temas/Pro/Arauak/ProNor0070.htm).
Most of these (they number over 140 in the data base) are merely vocabularies of various sorts and of greater or smaller levels of specialization; some, like the Friulian dictionary at http://www.friul.net/Dizionarimulti/index.asp, are multilingual (in this case, Italian, Slovenian, German, English, French and Spanish). Even Ladin, Sorbian, Sardinian, Albanian, Corsican and Asturian have products.
Digital speech recordings are available in at least eight languages through the internet. Several are large-scale, including the Arquivo Sonoro de Galicia (http://www.xunta.es/auto/ccga/arq_son.html), while others are merely spoken lists of words.
An essential step for languages is for syntactically-tagged corpora to be developed. Catalan, Galician, Ladin and Irish (http://www.ite.ie) projects work in this direction. The Catalan Language Academy has a vast corpus project underway. Albanian is among the eight languages which have lexical databases (http://www.unical.it), as is Corsican (Banque de Données Linguistiques Corses, http://www.ac-corse.fr/expos_autres/webdlc2/webdlc/Accueil.html). Tobar na Gaedhilge (http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/tobar/) contains over two million word-tokens from over 40 books in Irish and Gaelic.
In the field of lexical and semantic knowledge bases, such as WordNet, Catalan, Basque and Galician have such products. Galician voice synthesis research has been undertaken, (http://www.cirp.es/WXD/wxd/prox/prxSint1996.html) and Catalan has its main center at the Polytechnic University (e.g. http://www.talp.upc.es).
Moving now to internet tools linked to language, web crawlers have been developed for interfaces in Basque, Catalan, Galician, Irish and Welsh (mainly Opera and Netscape Navigator).
Advanced tools and applications include authoring aids such as spell checkers and correctors, and even grammar and style checkers. Those compiled work for Irish, Welsh, Gaelic, Basque, Frisian, Friulian, Ladin, Galician, Asturian (Mozilla, http://www.asturies.com/viesca/software/mozilla/Notes.html) and Catalan. They vary in quality, and some are the result of the work of an individual. There is an interesting translation tool for translating between Frisian on the one hand, and Dutch and English on the other (http://dictionaries.travlang.com/DutchFrisian); it also offers other tools for Catalan, Galician, Asturian, Welsh, Irish, Occitan and Basque. Machine translation systems have been developed for Catalan (principally in Valencia), Basque, Galician and Welsh. The same four language have developed language recognition programmes, and speech synthesizers, such as SpeechDat Cymru, which also exists in Catalan. Finally, Catalan has versions of Eudora, LeechFTP, GetRight and other popular internet software; and shares, with Galician, developments in the field of information retrieval and extraction systems.
All in all, it seems clear that only a few of the languages dealt with have significant work in this field (particularly, Catalan Basque, Galician and Welsh) while Sami, Luxembourgish and Sardinian have not even been mentioned, though the development of appropriate software and digitalised corpora is underway for the Sami language. In some cases a minority languages gets in as a sideline to another project: an example is the Provençal Database, to be found within the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL, http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/). Sorbian, for its part, may benefit from software developed for other, or all, Slavonic languages.
3. REGIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLANS AND LESSER-USED LANGUAGE
INCLUSION
Wales was one of the first regions to benefit from the EC's RISI projects and the Welsh Development Agency established the Wales Information Society Office which was responsible for developing several initiatives using structural funds. It also encouraged other developments. With the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales the original RTP has given way to a more comprehensive policy referred to as 'Cymru ar Lein/Wales on-line' http://www.cymruarlein.wales.gov.uk/. This links with the conception of the new body as one which, from the outset, would focus on Information and Communication Technnology use. Thus the web site has established a comprehensive link between government and the citizen and also with the various activities of the Assembly. The 'plan' such as it is is dynamic in the sense that it focuses upon the on-going activities of the Assembly. It also links with a range of other issues discussed elsewhere in this document. These activities and the web site are entirely bilingual. However the absence of HLT limits discussion across the languages. The Welsh Language Board is accountable to the Assembly but it does not have a coherent technology plan which goes beyond an awareness of the need to develop a welsh language Information and Communication Technnology capacity and the promotion of associated actions.
The picture is somewhat similar in Scotland but with far less emphasis placed upon Gaelic. The lead partners are the Scottish Parliament and the Highland and Islands Development Board. The later has primary responsibility for the Gaelic language. Its web site does have reference to projects and activities but there is little comprehensive development. It would appear that the broadband issue in Scotland will be resolved by developing poles of access with technology parks. It is unclear if this will involve the Gaelic language area.
In Ireland it is doubtful that the Gaeltacht will receive broadband, if the current emphasis on free market principles continues. In planning terms the various county authorities in the west of Ireland are drawn together to form a NUTS III region which can access structural funds. If a current proposal, the delivery of broadband be restricted to communities with a population over 1,000, is adopted, large swathes of the Gaeltacht will be excluded. Moreover, the central nature of the state means that most planning initiatives derive from Dublin and there is little sense of a coherent regional development ethos that derives from the respective regions. Udaras na Gaeltachta is involved in seeking to extend the New Economy into the Gaeltacht as a basis for promoting Irish. However, until a coherent plan emerges their hand are tied.
In Catalonia there is a plan which also encompasses the Catalan language. This plan is currently giving way to a new development in the form of a comprehensive overview of the New Economy and an associated extensive consultation exercise involving all of the main players in the New Economy in Catalonia. There are also specific partnerships using the Triple Helix model, such as that involving the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Information and Communication Technnology sector. As with most such developments in Catalonia the inclusion of Catalan is taken for granted, and there are specific projects that pertain to the language. The Regional Development Plan (http://dursi.gencat.es/ca/de/pla_estrategic.htm) developed by the government of Catalonia does include specific projects related to the Catalan language.
The same is, by and large true of the Basque Autonomous Community where infra structural developments include the establishment of an autonomous telecommunications sector. The Basque plan has deliberately not highlighted the language issue, however, in its formulation, though in its implementation the Basque language does receive support.
The Friuli region in Italy is not unlike the Gaeltacht in Ireland in that it is merely part of a wider region where most of the regional policy, such as it is, is developed. Thus any technology plans are unlikely to have very much reference to the specific nature of Friulian. This limitation also applies to the neighbouring Slovene-speaking region except that here there is some indication of integration with activities in Slovenia itself. Certainly the link to the Slovene library service is an important part of planned developments. It is quite conceivable as for other extra territorial language groups that this language group will be incorporated into developments in Slovenia. These observations also apply to the Slovene-speaking population in Austria except that the roll out of broadband is already more effective than in Italy. In Brittany on the other hand the only regional development initiatives which will have much relevance for linking Breton with the New Economy pertain to the Department of Finistère where there are indications that government on line will involve Breton.
As to software developed for the internet, languages group(s) including the Welsh, Irish, Basque, Catalan and Galician groups have developed versions of the most widely used software tools, such as several operating systems, the music file manager WinAmp (available also in Asturian) and web crawlers such as Netscape. Softcatalà for Catalan (http://www.softcatala.org), Softkat (for Basque, http://194.30.78.149/softkat ) and Proxecto Xis-Galego 21 for Galician (http://www.galego21.org/xis/) are three organizations devoted primarily to this work, as well as to developing new software. Very little has been found for other languages like Corsican, Occitan and Sardinian.
4. CULTURAL DIGITAL RESOURCES AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
The development, storage and accessing of digital resources in the context of the emerging Digital Economy require the creation of Media Asset Management Systems. The extent to which this is proceeding within each region is an object of study. We must realise that we are just in the beginning stages of any development of the Digital Value Chain (DVC). Thus far it is unlikely that a regional DVC has been developed anywhere.
Similar to the situation of learning platforms we could distinguish more or less three arenas for the realisation of cultural digital resources.
It is interesting to note that we find in this section most of the languages studied in Spain. These minority groups have at least websites reproducing literary and/or academic texts. Some libraries are fully digital: Biblioteca Joan-Lluís Vives (http://www.lluisvives.com/) is a good example of a resource containing digital versions of important Catalan literary texts. InterRomania (http://interromania.free.fr/) has literary texts in Sardinian, Catalan and Corsican. The musical resources are plentiful. Significantly, each language studied in Spain has at least one website offering such recordings, with MP3, given the ease with which digitisation is possible. In Spain we find also a wide variety of other digital resources related to each culture: from photography to the visual arts, cartoons, catalogues of films made (and/or dubbed, in the case of Catalan). A high quality Galician multimedia resource centre is housed at http://www.culturagalega.org.
We may conclude that the existing cultural digital resources appear in general to be fairly homogeneous and could provide a viable basis for media management systems. Still, it remains doubtful whether the very small groups of speakers really justify the development and implementation of such systems – excepting minorities like the Catalans or Welsh. The Cymru'n Creu project in Wales is developing at least one end of the DVC. The exploitation end is emerging but is not articulated with the content end. The content end requires considerable investment whereas the production end does not. It is less likely that the other regions of minority speakers will be DVC regions and may well emerge as either content regions or production regions, more likely the latter. This is largely because regional resources are housed in the capital region of the state so that initiatives will derive from that location on a statewide basis. This does not preclude the emergence of regional eContent economies but it is less likely than in the historic regions with strong political autonomy.
To summarise: Whether the DVC regions are to focus on minority language digital resources will depend on two things:
5. CONVERGENCE AND BROADCASTING
Together with Sweden, Wales was the first country to enter digital television. This involved the Welsh language analogue television broadcasting commissioner S4C (http://www.s4c.co.uk/index.html). However, this early entry does not appear to have given it much of a lead, largely because of the limited funds available for developing a comprehensive digital content. Consequently developments have been slower than expected. Nonetheless there have been some interesting aspects of convergent development including the Wales Digital College which sought to integrate the potential of broadcasting and the web for learning developments using Welsh. The main weakness of this initiative seems to involve competition with other learning providers and insufficient attention to constructivist pedagogies. More recently the BBC Wales has also created a digital service for Wales (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/gwybodaeth). There is a highly ambitious development involving local platforms which integrate electronic publishing using community newspapers, local people developing their own story-lines, discussion groups and also a link with the Welsh diaspora through digital radio.
Welsh plays a central role in this development. Another development in Wales that is in its infancy involves international broadband TV, digital resources and rugby which will have a minority language input. There is also 'Arwain' a networking club that uses a licence-free portion of the broadcasting spectrum to deliver enhanced TV, high-quality music and business benefits over the internet. The developments in Scotland are led by the BBC and do integrate Gaelic to a limited extent. The Gaelic analogue production serves as a viable platform for transformation into digital production.
Sweden's early entry has been thwarted by the high cost of set-top boxes. Recently a children's digital channel has been created but there is little evidence of any minority language involvement.
Ireland is being held back by reference to convergence by the failure of some of the cable providers and also by the privatisation of some of the broadcasting assets. RTE - the state broadcaster - has signed up with Sky Digital having abandoned its former plans for a terrestrial digital service. Failures in the UK and Spain is leading to caution. The small size of the domestic market makes the generation of revenue for free to air digital television. The challenge is to create quality content which will have cultural impact and potential. This will not be ceded to the private sector. RTE are also developing an interactive service which involves 360 production. There are also plans to exploit the learning potential of convergence via a Learning Channel. These developments are in the planning stage and both Sky and NTL are also slow in developing full digital services. Inevitably there will be an Irish language component to these developments.
In Catalonia a Catalan-language satellite digital television service has been put in place; it is also beamed to South America and much of western Europe. (In addition two of the Spanish digital platforms have decided to merge.) The involvement of SMEs in production is similar to the situation in Wales. Thus the private-public partnership involves a single public player as a commissioning agent and a plethora of independent SMEs which provide the programming. The public body - Corporació Catalana de Ràdio i Televisió - intends to play a role in general multimedia developments as they unwind. This body owns subsidiaries which are also involved in New Media Developments. There is also a digital service to the Catalan diaspora. The low uptake of set-top boxes means that providers offer services in both analogue and digital format without any new programming. This holds up expansion It is estimated that it will take 3 to 5 years for interactive digital television to make an impact. Again Catalan will be at the heart of these developments. There are at least eleven Catalan radio stations broadcasting on the internet from the large Catalunya Ràdio (http://www.catradio.com/) to even small local stations such as Ràdio Santa Cristina (http://www.rscfm.com/). There are also several Basque stations using the Basque language.
There is no comparable service for Asturian.
Galicia has a strong commitment to digitisation and its broadcasting service has embraced the new developments by integrating satellite digital broadcasting with its diaspora. The developments are quite exciting and Galician is at the heart of them. Basque is not far behind these developments. Internet TV exists for Occitan (http://www.oc-tv.net/, Galician (Televisión de Galicia, http://www.tvg.es/tvrede/privideo.htm), Basque and Corsican, Slovene in Italy but not for Catalan. France 3 Corse has uploaded some of its programmes, a few of which (e.g. local news programmes) are available in Corsican: http://www.france3.fr/semiStatic/382-1250-NIL-NIL.html. France 3 apparently plans to do the same for Occitan and Catalan.
Formal discussions of digital broadcasting in Austria only commenced at the beginning of 2002, and it is expected that digital terrestrial services will be in place during 2003. However it is unlikely that Austria will benefit from more than one or two multiplexes. Transmission will mainly be terrestrial supplemented by cable. ATV the cable provider intends to provide a service before summer 2002. It is unlikely that the Slovene language group will benefit from these developments and will have to await developments in Slovenia.
Finland initiated a broad digital service during the past few months. Hitherto a digital broadcasting service was provided in Helsinki, Tampere and Turku as early as the end of 2000. It consists of a terrestrial system which currently has a reach that covers 70% of the population. It will be 2006 before all households receive the digital service and analogue services will cease at this date. However it would appear that the public is lukewarm about this development, only between 20,000 and 25,000 set-top boxes or 1% of the potential having been sold as of May 2002. A further 10,000 boxes have been sold for cable transmission. The cost of the boxes and of the digital television sets are prohibitive. It does mean however that there must be a conversion rate of 700,000 sets per year during the next four years. The state allocates the three multiplexes and the activities of the licence holders. They also specify the nature of the content to be delivered. This will lead to regional channels broadcasting regional materials. And there will be a public broadcasting component. It is unlikely that this service will encompass the Sami language groups who will either have to rely on Norwegian provision or the development of local broadband TV. On the other it is inevitable that the Swedish language group will have a digital service albeit that it may derive from Swedish providers and content.
The two language groups in north eastern Italy suffer from the centralisation of the digital developments. There are some developments associated with digital radio provision in Friuli. The situation of the Slovene language group parallels the same language group in Carinthia. There has been a major development in Brittany with a major television service in Breton being created. This already involves digital productions and there are moves to integrate the associated functions that derive from convergence with the Breton language.
Examples of electronic publishing have been found in 16 of the 21 language groups studied (all except for Albanian, Cornish, Franco-Provençal, Luxembourgish and Sorbian). This widespread abundance is partly because orthodox publishing in the minority language already exists and partly because of the relatively low cost. In many cases an existing publisher branches out in parallel, producing electronic publications side by side with printed editions. Thus the “Academia de la Llingua Asturiana” has fully four digital journals of a cultural and literary nature, such as Lletres Asturianes, http://www1.asturnet.es/alla/PAGINA1.html. The phenomenon is stronger when developments involve exploiting convergence. This is already happening in Wales: Welsh is used where the main newspaper and the BBC are cooperating.
As costs fall regional broadcasting and publishing will converge and will become far more localised. The publishing houses in Carinthia (Austria) are also developing electronic Slovene language services. The Slovene newspaper in Italy is also available on-line (http://www.primorski.it) but further developments are limited. Friulian has a limited development as does the Gaelic language group in Scotland. Ireland's developments are also in a rudimentary state. Ladin has news websites, but given the limited size of the community, such a service can never aim to be able to compete in range and depth with the media of larger communities. More progress has been made by another small but dispersed language community: the Samis. Traditional/analogue media and platforms in Sami are being used by a significant number of Sami-speakers, but digital publication has not yet reached the point where larger quantities of output are accessible via the new media. Today’s efforts to provide content are shared by Sami-speakers in every Scandinavian state and can thus not be attributed to the group of Finnish Sami alone.
In other cases, however, the Internet only provides information and in these cases no entry has been made in the data base. An example is an Albanian journal and the publications of the publishing house; in this case no electronic publications are produced.
A clear distinction must be made between periodicals (newspapers, journals, magazines, etc.) and eBooks and other printed material available in electronic format. As to the former, a number of news-services (such as newspapers) are represented in the web and employ Frisian or Catalan languages in their services. The latter has news agencies with Catalan-medium services. Catalan also boasts a daily newspaper, Diari de Barcelona, which only has an electronic edition (http://www.diaridebarcelona.com). Most others, however, share an electronic edition with a printed version (e.g. the Slovenian-language daily Primorski (http://www.primorski.it).
In sheer numbers of electronic publishing websites, Catalan (118) and Basque (92) have the greatest presence in the data base. Many of these, however, are in fact on-line dictionaries and/or encyclopaedias, and have been classified as belonging to two categories in the data base. Others are published simultaneously in several language, such as SARDYNIA News, which appears in Sardinian (e.g. http://www.crs4.it/sarnews/mese2/frame_1s.htm), Italian and English. The Internet provides and extremely significant means for expatriate members of many of these language communities to remain in touch with their home culture.
Furthermore, the internet allows greater dissemination for existing products. A good example is a multilingual CD-Rom on lesser-used languages, Lingua+, the contents of which are now accessible via the Internet (http://www1.euskadi.net/euskara_lingua/PDF/GUIA_CS.PDF).
All in all however, most of these communities share a limited potential market, which in many cases is being eroded by language shift among youngsters. This situation could change if more younger people accessed resources in their language. In this case they would be perhaps interested in using it also in the digital world – in concurrence with English. And the dominant languages of Europe.