Technology seems to be conspiring to stop me from speaking Afrikaans. First, it was my cell phone and sending SMSs. Every phone I owned which supported the T9 system neglected to add Afrikaans as a language, even though the software existed. This meant I had to learn really quickly how to turn T9 off. Then I upgraded to smartphones and the iPhone had really good routines for guessing what you meant to type on the small keyboard. Unfortunately, again, no Afrikaans support. This time, even though I can switch between keyboards quickly, there seems to be no fast way to disable autocorrect. You have to navigate away from where you are, into settings, then disable it, which probably will cost you more time than you’re losing because you’re constantly told to replace “moet” with “Moët”.
On my desktop, I often have to defend my choice of running Linux and not having Microsoft Word on my computer. When I tell people that I couldn’t open the document they sent me with the correct formatting, they often act like it is my problem for not running the same software that they do, rather than their problem for using software that not everyone can run. I get the same strange looks when I complain that some of our intranet can only be used using Internet Explorer, which really has no version for Linux (or Mac for that matter).
The field of computer programming has a similar problem: do you learn one language really well, or use lots of smaller languages that work well for a particular task? Development tools typically favour a single-language approach.
The general picture one gets is that technology, or more properly systems, work best with less diversity. The idea is that everyone could read what everyone writes if we all spoke the same language, or used the same software. The benefits of monoculture and conformity are obvious.
Unfortunately there are benefits to diversity, too. I find myself in two minds here, as I know the benefits of using multiple tools really well. I’m not quite so sure about the benefits of multiple spoken languages, but I suspect that they may justify the idea of a second language in addition to a lingua franca.
I don’t know whether this issue will be resolved any time soon, but my personal take is that conformity drives should be focussed on infrastructure which allows for variation on the user level rather than implicitly assuming conformity.
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