Wikipedia currently speaks 204 languages. The free online encyclopedia is totally “open”, written by readers who add entries and modify existing entries. It is truly multilingual. And it couldn’t be otherwise, driven by the principle of shared knowledge. Of course, many languages have just one article, or maybe just an opening page… But even so 204 Wikipedias have been activated. Considering that 90 per cent of existing languages are not represented on the Internet Unesco statistic the (voluntary) commitment of Wikipedians for the protection of languages is really admirable. There is a small encyclopedia in Maori, one in Yiddish, in Mongolian…
Last February for example Wikipedia was activated in Armenian, the language of Jesus that is facing extinction: it already has 549 articles. Picking through Wikipedia’s statistics, you discover that there are 1932 contributions in Sicilian. The biggest Wikipedia is still the English one (with about 686 thousand articles, out of a total of over two million). German follows (about 260,000), then French (over 140,000), Japanese (around 135,000), Swedish (almost 100,000), Dutch (around 85,000), Polish (around 80,000), Portuguese (around 62,000), Spanish (over 60,000) and Italian (over 55,000).
But not only do so many encyclopedias exist, there are also ties between them: interlanguage links, also called colloquially “interwiki”, are links between articles on the same subject written in different languages. Wikipedia users also contribute to the development of the encyclopedias by translating pieces written by others. So the community is active. "We are committed to working with language speakers and computing organizations to support as many languages as possible".
Of the top ten languages on the Internet, English is at number one with a presence of 31.6 percent, Chinese is second (13.2%), Japanese third (8.3%), Spanish fourth (6.4%), German fifth (5.9%), French sixth (4.1%), Korean seventh(3.4%), Italian and Portuguese are equal at 3 percent, and lastly Dutch with 1.6 percent (data Internet World Stats - updated 23 July 2005).
During the meeting Multilingualism for Cultural Diversity and Participation of All in Cyberspace, held in Mali in May, in preparation for the second World Summit on the Information Society, to be held from the 16 to 18 November in Tunis, Unesco confirmed the necessity of a multilingual cyberspace and of tangible steps to support those languages that are not yet present on the Internet.
• Every language is an archive, a library, and a repository of knowledge. • Denial to access information in one’s mother tongue is equivalent to the denial of a human right. • It is counterintuitive to believe that a nation can produce in an optimal way if its people are forced to work a foreign language. • Multilingualism is a political imperative to democratize our societies, so that everyone can make a contribution. • No one can participate in responsible decision-making unless they are in command of his/her own language. • In terms of pedagogy, how do children learn best? In their mother tongue. • Language is about creativity, spontaneity and self-esteem – it is about identity.
