Noncompositional

A recent posting to slashdot talks about a conflict between the Mapuche people and Microsoft. It seems that the leadership of the Mapuche people are unhappy about Microsoft’s latest translation of Windows. From the CNN article:

But Mapuche tribal leaders have accused the U.S. company of violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission. They even sent a letter to Microsoft founder Bill Gates accusing his company of “intellectual piracy.” “We feel like Microsoft and the Chilean Education Ministry have overlooked us by deciding to set up a committee (to study the issue) without our consent, our participation and without the slightest consultation,” said Aucan Huilcaman, one of the Mapuche leaders behind the legal action. “This is not the right road to go down.”

Predictably, most of the slashdot crowd was dead set against the Mapuche position. Given that in that part of the web, the slogan “information wants to be free” is something of a mantra, the predominant view was that trying to regulate the usage of a (human) language was the most radical type of intellectual property stupidity. Some discussants on slashdot also mentioned (reasonably, I think) the fact that the Mapuche leadership hasn’t acted (publicly) against some other online dictionaries (though this may be because they were consulted in their creation). They are also working with Chilean leadership to help revitalize and increase use of the language — though among non-speakers of the Mapuche community, not of the larger national community. This also caused confusion among the slashdot crowd — wouldn’t a localized version of popular software do nothing but help the revitalization process? In the end, it’s unclear from the news article exactly what the tribe leaders want, from Microsoft in particular or from anyone in general, who wishes to do something related to their language. It has, of course, been studied by both South American and international scholars, and I don’t know what sort of agreement those scholars had with the people who they consulted with.

The question of who “owns” a language, as I have learned in my field methods class, a very important issue for linguists and other (ethnographical/anthrolopological/etc) fieldworkers who work with politically disenfranchised people. There are many stories of groups of native people who are distrustful of university researchers who, it is feared, want to go into the community, extract knowledge about the culture and language, and then retreat to the university to publish cultural information in obscure places (like, say, academic journals) in obscure ways (like, say, using the jargon of theoretical linguistics). For a community attempting to keep their language alive, it might seem foolish and/or insulting to invest time and effort so that that an outsider can learn their language/culture, only to give nothing back to the community while profiting from that knowledge. It may also seem like a slight against them that much or any of their cultural knowledge is now fodder for academic discussion. And for this reason, many communities (I have heard mostly about those in California, but it may well be true for many other American groups) work out very (sometimes legally) explicit deals with those linguists who they work with. And those linguists are often expected in turn to help the community in working with their language, if such help is desired (such as publishing accessible grammars and dictionaries, or training native linguists or teachers, or making recordings and texts publicly or tribe-internally available).

It’s hard for me to take a clear position on the Microsoft-Mapuche conflict, since the facts are about as clear as mud. Though in general I’m a fan of free information, that’s normally in the context of everyone involved having the same ideas about what can possibly count as “information,” and what sorts of things are potentially classifiable as “private.”