Imagine standing on a dock in Sulawesi, to your right, a fisherman shouts in Bugis. Behind you, children laugh in Bahasa Indonesia, in the market an old woman bargains in Javanese, while a boatman from Maluku sings in his mother tongue. This is Indonesia, one country but a thousand voices.
As part of the #BlackLivesMatter protests of Summer 2020, I looked to the IETF to recirculate a draft on racist terminology in technical standards that I had co-authored in 2019.
When most people think of Mexico, the first thing that comes to mind is Spanish, the language of daily life, government, education and the media. And yes, Spanish is dominant, spoken by the vast majority of the country’s 120 million people. But here’s the story that often goes untold: Mexico is not just a Spanish-speaking nation. It is a country woven together by a tapestry of over 68 national languages and more than 350 linguistic variants, each one carrying centuries of history, tradition, and identity ( source ).
You can ride a train for two hours in Switzerland and watch the world around you change languages. One moment, your ticket inspector greets you in Swiss German, two stops later, it’s French and by the time you reach Ticino, the rhythm shifts to Italian. Somewhere in the valleys of Graubünden, you might hear Romansh , a language spoken by less than 1% of the population, yet proudly displayed on official signs.
Desculpa, você fala inglês?
Sorry, do you speak English?
That was the question Lucas, a 25-year-old developer from São Paulo, faced during a virtual global hackathon. The international team he joined was excited to innovate but as the only Brazilian in the group, Lucas soon realized he wasn’t just translating words, he was translating his culture, his communication style, and even his identity. They spoke English, he spoke tech in Portuguese.
Every two weeks, the world loses a language. That means a community somewhere says its final prayer or forgets how to name the stars in its own tongue. According to UNESCO , more than 3,000 of the 7,000+ spoken languages today are endangered. And when a language dies, so does the culture, memory, and wisdom it carries.
In an increasingly globalized world, especially in the tech ecosystem, understanding and respecting cultural diversity is a necessity. Tech spaces thrive on ideas that come from all corners of the world. But to truly benefit from this global community, we must go beyond surface-level interactions and genuinely understand each other’s backgrounds.
Why Language Isn’t Universal and That’s a Good Thing
In the previous blog post we explored how inclusive naming helps shape equitable systems in tech. But inclusion doesn’t stop at replacing a few terms, it’s about recognizing the richness of voices from all over the world and how culture influences communication.
In a World Shaped by Words, What Message Are We Sending?
Language is more than just a tool for communication, it shapes our perceptions, biases, and realities. In the digital age, where technology influences nearly every aspect of our lives, the words we use in software, documentation, and branding hold immense power.
Welcome back to our series Moving the Needle on inclusive language. In this series, we talk to leaders in the cloud native space as they share the inclusive naming initiatives they care about. This will include tools, activities, and results they have discovered along the way.
Welcome back to our series Moving the needle on inclusive language. In this series, we talk to leaders in the cloud-native space as they share the inclusive naming initiatives they care about. This will include tools, activities, and results they have discovered along the way.
Welcome to our series Moving the Needle on inclusive language. In this series, we will be talking to leaders in the cloud native space as they share the inclusive naming initiatives they care about. This will include tools, activities, and results they have discovered along the way.
As we continue to advance into the age of technology, attention is being paid to how companies are responding to their learnings from the various social justice initiatives surrounding us. The enormity of social justice inequalities coming to light last year has been a catalyst for many businesses to look within themselves at how they do business—as an organization, as an employer, and as a member of the community and the world.
This post will be short, because it really is that simple.
My team at Cisco builds platform services that underlie the multiple projects within the Emerging Technology and Incubation group. Our mission is to build ‘paved roads’ for developers; we create common reusable patterns and services that any engineer or venture needs to deliver an application.
A Short History
The Inclusive Naming Initiative was born out of the efforts by the Kubernetes community to address non inclusive language, which coalesced with the Black Lives Matter movement that rose to prominence last year.