Request to register business in Indigenous language denied by B.C. government

Technically the UN declaration is not legally binding, so there is no legal conflict.

Of course, that isn't meant to say that the declaration shouldn't be respected or that a government/nation might not face backlash for failing to respect it, but in a Canadian court I believe (IANAL) that the UN declaration would be effectively irrelevant.

Edit: I made this comment before reading the article; it appears BC has actually passed legislation requiring them to implement UNDRIP (https://declaration.gov.bc.ca/), so the parent's question remains valid.

Unless the former is enshrined in Canadian or British Columbian law, it’s irrelevant and therefore there isn’t a legal conflict.

English and French language characters are a specific subset of Latin characters.

If you're being pedantic, modern English uses Latin script and Arabic numerals in addition to a variety of special characters. English and French use alphabets which are derived from the Latin alphabet. The Wiki pages on the subject are quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script

I assume it means you can only use the sunset of Latin characters used in French and English, e.g. 'ç' is acceptable but 'ñ' isn't.

I think the reason they specify English or French characters is that Latin doesn't really specify what is allowed. French can use á or à or ç. Latin was generally written without diacritical marks by Romans with the occasional exception of the apex which looks similar to acute accents to me. If we're talking about modern Latin writings, things like macrons (a horizontal line above like ā) and even breves have been used (like ă). Would we be talking about the classical Latin alphabet which is missing the letters J, U, and W?

If we're talking about "Latin characters" in a colloquial sense, do we allow things like ñ? That's valid in the Spanish version of the latin alphabet, but not in standard English or French. French does use the accent tréma (¨) on certain letters, but not all letters. What about the German ẞ or Norwegian Ø? Are those latin characters? The Romanian ș? The Welsh Ŵ? The Czech Ď? The Polish Ł? The Maltese Ħ?

Specifying English and French is meant to add specificity to what is allowed. While so many languages use "Latin characters", they're often a bit different. I don't look at something in German and think "what on earth are those letters", but I might think "what is that ẞ and what are those dots?"

I'm not arguing that the law should specify how companies name themselves. I'm just saying that specifying English and French makes sense because specifying "Latin characters" leaves a lot to be desired. Do they mean to exclude "J"? Do they mean to exclude "ç"? Do they mean to include "Ł"? You might think that it's obvious what the latin characters are: they're clearly the set of characters that a native English or French speaker thinks is normal, right? As a native-English speaker, the Spanish "ñ" or the French "ç" seem familiar - I've seen them a bunch in my life and I know what they do. The Polish "Ł"? That's unfamiliar to me. What does the line do? I don't know.

They wanted to specify what was allowed and what wasn't allowed and "Latin characters" doesn't narrow it down enough - or potentially narrows it down too much by excluding many English and French words and names.

>Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do.

Who is "we"? No one alive today stole anything.

Maybe it's more about the utility of the use of a common language and script that results in a functional society, and sometimes the boundary conditions of time and effort cause some scripts to be unsupported.

> "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet"

That's pretty much how all the indigenous alphabets in Canada came to be when they were created by missionaries in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics

> Where do you draw the line, though?

I think the likely answer is going to be – no, they won't allow any language, they will keep to a restricted alphabet for company names, based on what characters are used in a list of allowed languages. What they'll do, is extend that list to include indigenous languages of British Columbia. So likely there will be a process, in which an indigenous community will submit an application to have its script allowed in company names (and possibly other names such as personal names). The government will ask professional linguists to advise on the application to ensure its correctness. Then the characters used to write that particular language will be added to the allowed list.

I think the argument is that the British Columbia government has a special moral duty to its indigenous peoples to help preserve their languages and culture, which justifies them going the extra mile to support the official use of their languages. I don't think it has the same moral duty to preserve Tibetan or Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) so it would be justified in not extending this provision to those languages.

One potential issue I foresee is data interchange. I presume that British Columbia shares company data with other Canadian provinces, the Canadian federal government, probably even foreign governments (especially the US) and private sector firms (such as D&B Hoovers). What if the data interchange format doesn't allow these additional characters?

One solution is to give the company two names – its name in the indigenous language, and an English/French approximation to that. The system would store both names. Data interchanges which can't support the indigenous language characters would only receive the English/French approximation name.

Sounds like a microsoft problem. French business names are common in canada, which can use é which would fail the microsoft check.

On the technical side, internationalized domain names have been a solved problem for a while.

Is my punycode decoder broken, or shouldn't that be "kyecn-elcd16ehurf" ?

> There's no reason not to allow Unicode characters, and Unicode already allows that alphabet to be used.

No reason besides the fact that Unicode characters can cause countless errors in legacy systems downstream.

Perhaps the money that could be spent on supporting arbitrary renditions of indigenous languages in non-standard latin-derived characters would be more wisely spent on supporting those communities directly.

A little bit of contracting work supporting legacy government computing infrastructure should quickly cure you of that delusion.

Unicode lets you record the data but does not address the societal problem of record keeping in a way that all staff can use.

British Columbia has a very large population of Chinese speakers. If you allow multiple language script for every language you would still need a transliteration in English or French, since they are the common denominator languages. Same is true to for Cyrillic, Arabic and Korean, all of which are well represented in modern day Canadian society.

Some years back the City of Richmond BC was having difficulty in the fire department because they could not identify the names of some local businesses that called in because the signs were all in Chinese script. :)

Not sure how that has been or was actually rectified.

Would it be a good thing if businesses could be registered in all international character sets? I could see this causing problems. Government officials are only going to be needed to speak the official languages. How would they even refer to these entities they can't read?

Was it done in pen and paper? I doubt it.. Imagine trying to decipher someone's handwritten rendition of hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ k̓ʷə́yecən. Good luck. I imagine there were restrictions on character set, name length, and other attributes in the days of pen and paper as well.

Because your culture is either your day-to-day life, or it's a performance you put on to self-reenforce your identity. If the later, it's not important and you can relegate it to a historical observation.

In this case, if they're trying to hold onto it that means it's not part of daily life. They're adding friction to people's lives and wasting children's learning time on trivia.

Also, let's talk performative political correctness for a moment. Any other message is racism of low expectations. "Natives can and should live in the wild because that's their way." -- TooManyPeople

It's race-focused and thus ridiculous. The best life outcomes (in Canada and everywhere) are in the cities and by-definition, not related to native culture or practices. Poor non-indigenous people know this and move there for opportunity. We shouldn't burden indigenous people with this ahistorical and racist expectation that they'll forego their potential to live in the wood and manage nature, speaking dead languages. Natives are people, not political points.

Hebrew could have been considered a "Dead" language until it became the state language of Israel.

> "You just about wiped us out, the least you can do is let us use our language."

To be clear, no one is preventing them from using the language, only registering a business in a particular character set. Also, respectfully, (and I'm sure I'll be downvoted into the ground for asking, but) I don't understand the ethical calculus that faults living groups of people for things some other group of people (albeit with the same label) did centuries ago. The only way I can make it make sense is if we pretend that human beings are fungible tokens within their identity groups. I'm only digressing because this sort of rationale seems to keep coming up these days and I don't understand it.

> let us use our language

You mean the orthographic written form of the language that was codified by same "wiper outers" to help preserve it?

I wonder how other words in the same language have been written to use them as business names (non or less orthographic versions). Or considering typewriters and computers have long been useless with non-standard character sets, how the words were depicted when using those tools. Presumably there's some rendered form of the words that makes use of UTF-8, right?

That's the difference between an indigenous language and not.

The goal of recognizing the UN resolution wasn't that anything an indigenous person wants has to be accommodated, but that indigenous traditions must be recognized and allowed. Otherwise a native could learn Lojban and force the government to recognize it.

Nothing more offensive? That's a stunning admission of historical ignorance and is itself so offensive.

And this is why nobody outside of the fake-justice bubble cares at all about these issues, they're just social signaling for you people.

Are those names exclusively used? Or is there also English or French name?

Is this where we just triggered a recursive "think of the children" exchange like email auto-replies responding to each other ad-infinitum? :D

Exactly this.

My name has an accent in it. My legal name doesn’t, but I, not the government, am the arbiter of what my real name is.

How about "Canadian laws require businesses to be registered in one of two of Canada's legally recognized national languages"