June 4-5 at the Russian Language Institute of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba hosts the XI scientific and practical conference “Russian Language and Problems of Sociocultural Adaptation of Foreign Citizens in the Russian Federation”. Conference participants discuss the issues of integration of foreign citizens, international experience and scientific achievements in this area, and also exchange best regional practices.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev spoke at the opening of the Conference with a plenary report on multilingualism on the Internet. He noted that modern technologies help solve the problem of digital inequality and universal access to the Internet. An excellent illustration of this is the figure of almost 70% of the world's population having access to mobile communications and speaking different languages.
“There are 7,164 languages and dialects in the world, of which 3,045 are endangered. The Internet is a unique environment that can help preserve such languages. An excellent example of supporting national languages in the Internet space is .TATAR, intended for the resources of the Tatar-speaking cultural community, as well as for those who associate themselves with the Republic of Tatarstan and the Tatar nationality. It should be noted that the Russian segment of the Network is quite unique. We immediately received search engines, antiviruses and many other important components of a comfortable online environment in Russian,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
He also shared that the Coordination Center, together with RUDN, is studying the possibility of introducing in the national .РФ support for additional Cyrillic characters used in the national alphabets of the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation:
“According to the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages of the World, 136 languages of the peoples of Russia are now on the verge of extinction. Center’s experts, together with specialists in the field of philology and linguistics, are now studying the demand for such languages for use in the online environment, including in domain names, in order to understand how much the country’s population needs it. After all, the Internet should be, first of all, convenient for end users; people should feel comfortable coming online and existing there in a familiar environment in their native language.”
Let us remind you that as part of the educational day of the 14th Russian Internet Governance Forum, a Memorandum of Cooperation between the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia took place on April 8.
