Imagine your favourite social media platform does not let you post in English. Now think of a keyboard that won’t allow you to type in your own words. You would have two options: either switch to another language or remain digitally silent.

This is the reality for most people that speak indigenous languages and dialects.

There are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world, yet only 7% are reflected in published online material, according to Whose knowledge?, a campaign that aims to make visible the knowledge of marginalised communities online.

While Facebook supports up to 111 languages, making it the most multilingual online social media platform, a survey published by Unesco in 2008 found that 98% of the internet’s web pages are published in just 12 languages, and more than half of them are in English. This reduces linguistic diversity online to a handful of tongues, making it harder for those that speak one of the excluded languages of the internet.

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The Kaqchikel Mayan community from Guatemala includes more than half a million speakers. Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Kumez is part of it and was one of the organisers of the first Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, held in 2019.

“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and hence a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages,” he says. “So what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language.”