Indigenous Dialogues
Encyclopedia
The Indigenous Dialogues Foundation (Indiĝenaj Dialogoj or ID) was an international project which sought to empower organisations of indigenous peoples
worldwide to communicate directly, freely, and affordably, allowing them to more effectively work together for their common interests.
ID provided internet
connectivity and taught courses in Esperanto
as an international bridge language. Esperanto was chosen rather than a major national language such as English
because it is nationally neutral and relatively easy to master, while still backed and proven by an existing infrastructure—over a century of Esperanto culture
-- and its surface similarities to major European languages facilitate the learning of regional and world languages such as English, Spanish
, or Russian
.
Bessie Schadee and Sylvain Lelarge of the Netherlands
and José Carlos Morales of the Brunka (Boruca) people of Costa Rica
started ID in 1998; two worldwide and five regional courses were held from 1999 to 2001, with representatives from over twenty peoples. ID was supported by a number of international organizations, banks, governments, and private individuals.
The project also had close ties to Universal Esperanto Association in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs monthly magazine "IS - International Samenwerking" (International Cooperation) dedicated almost an entire page of its October 1999 number to the project, Universal Esperanto Association wrote in a press release in October 1999.
The article was titled "Esperanto Builds a Bridge Between Cultures," with the subtitle "A Course on Communication for Indigenous Peoples." It described ID's aims and reports on the first course with representatives of 18 peoples. At the end of the article Snam Stanley Iko from Papua New Guinea summed up ID's philosophy: "I believe that Esperanto can build bridges between people, because the world has a language problem. One person speaks this and the other speaks that, but we have to learn to understand each other and the world."
In 2000 a long-awaited Dutch grant was not received. After this and other hardships the project finally ceased to exist in the year 2002.
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
worldwide to communicate directly, freely, and affordably, allowing them to more effectively work together for their common interests.
ID provided internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
connectivity and taught courses in Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
as an international bridge language. Esperanto was chosen rather than a major national language such as English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
because it is nationally neutral and relatively easy to master, while still backed and proven by an existing infrastructure—over a century of Esperanto culture
Esperanto culture
The language Esperanto is often used to access an international culture, including a large body of original as well as translated literature. There are over 25,000 Esperanto books as well as over a hundred regularly distributed Esperanto magazines. Many Esperanto speakers use the language for...
-- and its surface similarities to major European languages facilitate the learning of regional and world languages such as English, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, or Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
.
Bessie Schadee and Sylvain Lelarge of the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and José Carlos Morales of the Brunka (Boruca) people of Costa Rica
Costa Rica
Costa Rica , officially the Republic of Costa Rica is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east....
started ID in 1998; two worldwide and five regional courses were held from 1999 to 2001, with representatives from over twenty peoples. ID was supported by a number of international organizations, banks, governments, and private individuals.
The project also had close ties to Universal Esperanto Association in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs monthly magazine "IS - International Samenwerking" (International Cooperation) dedicated almost an entire page of its October 1999 number to the project, Universal Esperanto Association wrote in a press release in October 1999.
The article was titled "Esperanto Builds a Bridge Between Cultures," with the subtitle "A Course on Communication for Indigenous Peoples." It described ID's aims and reports on the first course with representatives of 18 peoples. At the end of the article Snam Stanley Iko from Papua New Guinea summed up ID's philosophy: "I believe that Esperanto can build bridges between people, because the world has a language problem. One person speaks this and the other speaks that, but we have to learn to understand each other and the world."
In 2000 a long-awaited Dutch grant was not received. After this and other hardships the project finally ceased to exist in the year 2002.
See also
- Distributed Language TranslationDistributed Language TranslationDistributed Language Translation or Distribuita Lingvo-Tradukado was a project to develop an interlingual machine translation system for twelve European languages...
(Distribuita Lingvo-Tradukado) (DLT)