I know the Icelandic government spends some money for this and it shows. This tiny language has way more support then other way more spoken languages. If the Norwegian government wanted I bet the Sámi languages could have just as good of a support as Icelandic. Or if the Greenlandic government had more funds available I bet we would see Kalaallisut in more places online.
Serbian government would certainly support Serbian language voice recognition and synthesis, but probably not with as much money as Iceland would.
The idea that there is a difference between these two things is one of the more pernicious ones of the last hundred years.
Money is power. The exercise of power is politics. They can't be separated.
It certainly sounds like this is a political situation to me, almost to a tautology. The fact that these decisions was made on the basis of financial gain doesn't make them any less political.
The reason why there isn't a huge consumer market for indigenous languages is because they're overwhelmingly systematically unsupported by their respective governments in favor of the non-indigenous colonial languages.
To be clear, that's not Mozilla's fault, and not something they or other random organizations can fix, but as human beings we should all be happy and give credit to those organizations that do their small part.
Yet I have never seen an application that had a Sorbian translation, for one simple reason: Every Sorb also speaks German, so there is no financial incentive to invest in a Sorbian translation. The only things with Sorbian translations are those produced in the local area, e.g. the websites of local governments or local businesses.
If the UK is a country of countries then Greenland is most certainly an autonomous country. The Wikipedia article for Greenland has the word “country” mentioned 14 times, so I’m certainly not the only using the term this way.
Wow, I had no idea
The problem is not the Spanish language. The problem is a colonial peasant economy/society that turned into a post-colonial peasant society, with land-owning quasi-nobility ruling over disempowered (in this case, indigenous) laborers and freely exercising their power to steal, rape, kill, etc., without penalty; it is a situation more or less comparable to peasant societies around the world and throughout history, which are always very exploitative and often racist.
Working class Spanish speakers living in towns were in many ways also economically exploited, but considered “better than indigenous people” to be a core part of their identities, and also felt free to beat them, steal from them, etc. where they found the opportunity. It’s a situation broadly comparable to race relations in the US south, where poor whites considered “better than blacks” to be a defining part of their identity.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the history of exploitation of indigenous communities, and the way indigenous people were shut out of many social and economic activities, led to the preservation of native languages.
However I at the same time I’m also deeply disappointed by the lack of support for Iceland’s closest neighbour’s language—Greenlandic—which is an indigenous language, the sole official language of an autonomous country.
Generally, it takes only a few dedicated people to get software localised if good enough infrastructure is provided by the community!
I hope that's what we see with Mozilla Common Voice too!
Luckily, speech recognition research is making some good progress on dealing with low-resource languages so hopefully we'll see some acceptable models made from the little available open data that's out there.
I'm not sure "autonomous country" is an accurate description of what Greenland is. It is - for all intents and purposes - a devolved region of Denmark. It is still way too reliant on economic aid to be able to be independent and, honestly, probably couldn't exist as a developed nation without a patron (Denmark) or without selling its land/resources to a great power (USA, China). And the population is only 1/6 the size of Iceland's and is very dispersed on a massive arctic island, with most people living in tiny isolated villages by the coast.
With that in mind, you wouldn't expect great language support unless the Danish state steps in and spends some serious dough on it. I actually work on Danish language technology at the University of Copenhagen and let me tell you something... the Danish state hardly spends any money on Danish language resources either. We envy the kind of funding that researchers in countries like Iceland and Norway have access too.
I’m actually a little disappointed that there is not more collaboration between the language departments in Iceland and Greenland. Iceland does spend some money on foreign languages and there is much interest in general for foreign languages in Iceland. The former president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is a huge language buff and advocates for foreign languages a lot. So much so that the house of foreign languages at the University is named after her (https://vigdis.hi.is/).
It is generally believed in Iceland that setting up Icelandic cultural institutions in Reykjavík played a big part in our independence. Institutions such as the University, libraries and the National Theater. There is also big interest for Greenlandic independence in Iceland. Therefor it would make sense for a rich country like Iceland to spend some money in progressing the status of Kalaallisut, both in Iceland (by shared cultural events), Greenland (by help funding cultural institutions) and internationally (by help funding online language efforts).
I don’t think it is wrong to call Greenland a country. As mentioned elsewhere, the word country is not strictly defined. Sometimes it means strictly independent nations, but most of the time it doesn’t. E.g. here is CIA calling Greenland a country (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/greenland/).