Norsk i den digitale tidsalderen - Meta-Net

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Information technology changes our everyday lives. We
typically use computers for writing, editing, calculating
and information searching, and increasingly for read-
ing, listening to music, viewing photos and watching
movies. We carry small computers in our pockets and
use them to make phone calls, write emails, get informa-
tion and entertain ourselves, wherever we are. How does
this massive digitisation of information, knowledge and
everyday communication affect our language? Will our
language change or even disappear? What are the Nor-
wegian language’s chances of survival?
Many of the world’s 6,000 languages will not survive in
a globalised digital information society. It is estimated
that at least 2,000 languages are doomed to extinction
in the decades ahead. Others will continue to play a role
in families and neighbourhoods, but not in the wider
business and academic world. e status of a language
depends not only on the number of speakers or books,
films and TV stations that use it, but also on the pres-
ence of the language in the digital information space and
soware applications.
In this context, Norwegian is still having growing pains.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Norwegian lan-
guage technology existed on a very small scale. A
quite satisfactory translation existed from Bokmål and
Nynorsk, there was spell checking, and there was a small
question answering system, but people laughed at the
poor performance of the first speech recognition ap-
plications. An ambitious language industry initiative at
Voss failed. ere were higher education programmes
on language technology and computational linguistics
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and there was ongoing research in these areas, but there
was a shortage of language resources and tools.
ings started to change when the Research Council of
Norway took the initiative for a language technology
research programme in 2002, with the aim of develop-
ing knowledge and tools. is programme resulted in a
number of projects which created new competence and
laid the groundwork for Norwegian language technol-
ogy. e largest projects in this programme delivered
a text-to-speech system and a demonstrator of quality
translation from Norwegian to English.
More recently, a government White Paper from 2008
[2] and its acceptance in Parliament led to the establish-
ment of the Language Technology Resource Collection for
Norwegian – Språkbanken in 2010. is unit has begun
to build up and distribute language data that has long
been wanting in R&D. If these efforts are sustained, they
will be an invaluable investment in the future of Norwe-
gian.
However, this report reveals that despite considerable
achievements in the last decade, the situation is only
acceptable with respect to the most basic tools and re-
sources for Norwegian. When it comes to advanced ap-
plications, few tools and resources exist for Norwegian.
It is clear that we still have a long way to go to ensure
the future of Norwegian as a full-fledged player in the
modern – and future – European information society.
Information and communication technology are now
preparing for the next revolution. Aer personal com-
puters, networks, miniaturisation, multimedia, mobile
devices and cloud-computing, the next generation of
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