- under-resourced language was introduced in
2005 by a native English colleague I can't remember the name
of at the moment, to translate the title and description of a
workshop dedicated to NLP for pi-languages at TALN-05.
My feeling is that this term was in use before 2005. For example, Steve
Bird, writing in February 2004, gives here
(http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000481.html) a nice
list of alternative terms including under-resourced.
I think I coined the term non-indigenous minority language (NIML) in
1997, which enjoyed a brief period of currency, to cover the idea of a
language spoken by a local minority (e.g. Urdu in the UK), but to get
away from the predominant association at that time between the term
minority langauge, in Europe at least, and languages like Welsh,
Breton and so on.
In the USA, the term low-density language seemed to be prevalent: I
first came across it at the 1998 AMTA conference, in the title of Jones
and Havrilla's paper. In their paper they gloss low density as
languages of low diffusion, world minority langauges, ie langauges
for which major online resources are typically not available. As I
always liked to point out at that time, one of the world's top 3
languages (in terms of numbers of speakers), namely Hindi-Urdu, was
certainly a low-density language in this sense, but not a world minority
language; but at least the question of resources was foregrounded by
this term. I used the term in a 2001 paper.
The term lesser-studied languages (sic) was current in 2000, when it
was used in the title of a NATO Advanced Study symposium organized by
Kemal Oflazer. This list has already discussed (in Feb 2005) the
appropriateness or otherwise of lesser as opposed to less, so let's
not rerun that one (but as a pernickety native speaker I might point out
that a less-spoken language is spoken by fewer, not less, people!)
Last bit of thought: we should be more precise about the term
language.
For example, Chinese is not 1 language, but several (no
oral intercomprehension), with their
dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu (Shanghainese is a dialect
of Wu), Fujien, etc. Or Arabic, for that matter. And that is
Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually non-comprehensible languages, not
dialects. To describe them as dialects of Chinese would be like
describing French and German as dialects of European.
But it is fairly difficult to be very precise about the term language.
As was famously stated, possibly by Max Weinreich, A language is a
dialect with an army and navy (though see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy
). Although he was referring to Yiddish, Flemish~Dutch is the example
that always springs to my mind.
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