2018-02-28 14:22 GMT+01:00 Christoph Päper via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org >:
> > There are approximately 7,000 living human languages, > > but fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, > > mobile phones, and other devices. Fewer than 100 languages is a bit small, I can count nearly about 200 languages well supported with all the necessary basic support to develop them with content. The limitation however is elsewhere: in education and litteracy level for these languages so that people start using them as well on the web and in other medias or use them more easily in their daily life and improve the quality and coverage of data available in these languages. This includes developing an orthography (many languages don't have any developed and supported orthography, even if there was attempts to create dictionnaries, including online with Wikitionary). With the encoded scripts, you can already type and view correctly thousands of languages. This these languages are living, it should not be difficult to support most of them with the existing scripts that are already encoded (we've reched the point where we only have to encode historic scripts, to preserve the cultures or languages that have disappeared or are dying fast since the begining of the 20th century). Even if major languages will persist and regional languages will die, this should not be done without reintegrating in those major languages some significant parts of the past regional cultures, which can still become sources for enriching these major languages so that they become more precise and more useful and allow then easier access to past regional languages, possibly then directly in their original script, with people then able to decipher them or being interested to study them. Past languages and preserved texts will then remain as a rich source for keeping existing languages alive, vivid, productive for new terms, without having to necessarily borrow terms from less than 20 large "international" languages (ar, de, en, es, fa, fr, nl, id, ja, ko, pt, ru, hi, zh), written in only 6 well developed scripts (Arab, Latn, Cyrl, Deva, Hang, Hans, Jpan).
