The Swedish Language in the Digital Age — Executive Summary
Information technology changes our everyday lives. We typically use computers for writing, editing, calculating, and information searching, and increasingly for reading, 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 information 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?
All our computers are linked together into an increasingly dense and powerful global network. When Europe’s netizens discuss the effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident on European energy policy in forums and chat rooms, they do so in cleanly-separated language communities. What the internet connects is still divided by the languages of its users. Will it always be like this?
Many of the world’s 7,000 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. What are the Swedish language’s chances of survival?
With its 10 million speakers, Swedish is fairly well positioned compared to many languages. There is a number of public television channels with Swedish-language programming (Sweden: 7, Finland: 1) and some private TV broadcasters. The book and newspaper market, although often declared moribund, is in fact fairly stable and active, and the annual Swedish Book Fair is a major Nordic event with over 100,000 visitors.
Traditionally, it has been possible to use Swedish for communication all over the Nordic area. Mutual intelligibility with Norwegian and Danish is high. The three languages together have on the order of 20 million speakers, and the mixed varieties used in this context are commonly referred to as “Scandinavian”. Swedish is one of Finland’s two official languages, and Danish is taught in schools in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. However, English is increasingly taking the role of the lingua franca of the Nordic region, especially among younger speakers, and especially outside Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where Scandinavian still holds its own against English.
There are plenty of complaints about the ever-increasing use of English words and phrases in Swedish, and some even fear that Swedish will turn into a kind of mixed language. But our study suggests that this is misguided. Swedish has already survived the massive influx of new words and terms from German in the Middle Ages, as well as the intrusion of French words in the 18th and early 19th centuries. A good countermeasure to the threat of losing our beloved Swedish words and phrases is to actually use them – frequently and consciously; neither linguistic polemics about foreign influences nor government regulations are usually of any help. Our main concern should not be the gradual anglicisation of our language, but its complete disappearance from major areas of our personal lives. These are not science, aviation and the global financial markets, which actually need a world-wide lingua franca. We have in mind the many areas of life in which it is far more important to be close to a country’s citizens than to international partners – for example, domestic policies, administrative procedures, the law, culture and shopping.
The 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 presence of the language in the digital information space and software applications. Here too, the Swedish language is fairly well-placed: all important international software products are available in Swedish and the Swedish Wikipedia ranks number eleven in the world, right before the Chinese one.
In the field of language technology, Swedish is also well equipped with products, technologies and resources. There are applications and tools for speech synthesis, speech recognition, spelling correction, and grammar checking. There are also many applications for automatically translating language, even though these often fail to produce linguistically and idiomatically correct translations, especially when Swedish is the target language. This is partly due to the specific linguistic characteristics of the Swedish language.
Information and communication technology are now preparing for the next revolution. After personal computers, networks, miniaturisation, multimedia, mobile devices and cloud-computing, the next generation of technology will feature software that will support users far better because it speaks, knows and understands their language. Forerunners of such developments are the free online service Google Translate that translates between 57 languages, IBM’s supercomputer Watson that was able to defeat the US champion in the game of “Jeopardy”, and Apple’s mobile assistant Siri for the iPhone that can react to voice commands and answer questions in English, German, French and Japanese.
The next generation of information technology will master human language to such an extent that human users will be able to communicate using the technology in their own language. Devices will be able to automatically find the most important news and information from the world’s digital knowledge store in reaction to easy-to-use voice commands. Language-enabled technology will be able to translate automatically or assist interpreters; summarise conversations and documents; and support users in learning scenarios. For example, it will help immigrants to learn Swedish and integrate more fully into the country’s culture.
The next generation of information and communication technologies will enable industrial and service robots (currently under development in research laboratories) to faithfully understand what their users want them to do and then proudly report on their achievements.
This level of performance means going way beyond simple character sets and lexicons, spell checkers and pronunciation rules. The technology must move on from simplistic approaches and start modeling language in an all-encompassing way, taking syntax as well as semantics into account to understand the drift of questions and generate rich and relevant answers.
However, there is a yawning technological gap between English and Swedish, and it is currently getting wider. After a very successful research record in the 1980s and especially the 1990s, Sweden has currently put research and development in language technology on the backburner, because research support policies constantly need novel topics. As a result, Sweden (and Europe in general) lost several very promising high-tech innovations to the US, where there is greater continuity in their strategic research planning and more financial backing for bringing new technologies to the market. In the race for technology innovation, an early start with a visionary concept will only ensure a competitive advantage if you can actually make it over the finish line. Otherwise all you get is an honorary mention in Wikipedia.
Nevertheless, there is still a very high research potential on this side of the Atlantic. Apart from internationally renowned research centres and universities, there are a number of innovative small and medium-sized language technology companies that manage to survive through sheer creativity and immense efforts, despite the lack of venture capital or sustained public funding. On the other hand, many of these are oriented to an international market, where English-based products are a must. Although Swedish companies are active developers of web and search technologies, for example, technology specifically adapted to Swedish is only marginally involved and most R & D results and prototypes use the English language.
Every international technology competition tends to show that results for the automatic analysis of English are far better than those for Swedish, even though (or precisely because) the methods of analysis are similar, if not identical. This holds true for extracting information from texts, grammar checking, machine translation and a whole range of other applications.
Many researchers reckon that these setbacks are due to the fact that, for fifty years now, the methods and algorithms of computational linguistics and language technology application research have first and foremost focused on English. The number of publications on language technology for Swedish in leading international conferences and scientific journals is minuscule compared to the volume of papers focusing on English. However, other researchers believe that English is inherently better suited to computer processing. And languages such as Spanish and French are also a lot easier to process than Swedish using current methods. This means that we need a dedicated, consistent, and sustainable research effort if we want to be able to use the next generation of information and communication technology in those areas of our private and work life where we live, speak and write Swedish.
Summing up, despite the prophets of doom, the Swedish language is not in danger, even from the prowess of English language computing. However, the whole situation could change dramatically when a new generation of technologies really starts to master human languages effectively. Through improvements in machine translation, language technology will help in overcoming language barriers, but it will only be able to operate between those languages that have managed to survive in the digital world. If there is adequate language technology available, then it will be able to ensure the survival of languages with very small populations of speakers. If not, even ‘large’ languages will come under severe pressure.
The dentist jokingly warns: "Only brush the teeth you want to keep". The same principle also holds true for research support policies: you can study every language under the sun all you want, but if you really intend to keep them alive, you need to develop technologies to support them.
