Ensuring the presence of Catalan online is essential to guarantee the language survival. Faced to this challenge, the organizations that promote the use of Catalan language have joined forces to devote their technical and knowledge resources and ability for mobilization to guarantee the online presence of Catalan language. The new Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan is made up of Acció Cultural del País Valencià, Amical Wikimedia, Fundació.cat, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Institut Ramon Llull, Òmnium Cultural, Obra Cultural Balear, Plataforma per la Llengua, Softcatalà and WICCA.
The main tasks of the Alliance are to monitor, analyze, propose, and represent Catalan society’s linguistic rights online, coordinating the already existent efforts.
For the first time, organizations ally to guarantee the use of Catalan online and to ensure that the language has its due place according to its number of speakers.
With the support of the Government of Catalonia, the promoting organizations have identified several areas in the Internet where the presence of Catalan is not satisfactory: websites, mobile applications, social media, streaming platforms, car manufacturers, electrical appliances, voice assistants, and artificial intelligence.
The Alliance proposes to intervene in all these cases through three action lines: to identify the situation based on existing data; to contact the public and private agents that determine the presence of Catalan; and to follow up to verify the results of the improvement actions carried out and detect possible deteriorations as soon as possible.
In every case, the organization will deploy all its resources as technical knowledge, capacity of dissemination, prescription and mobilization, asking for the collaboration of Catalan academical and research institutions whenever necessary.
The Alliance hopes to increase its number of partners representing all the Catalan-speaking territories in the coming months. Also, the Government of Catalonia invited to collaborate its counterparts in other territories. Fundació.cat assumed The technical secretary of the Alliance, coordinated by the journalist Albert Cuesta.
First objective: improving SEO
In the recent months, there has been considerable media and public attention to the decline of Catalan websites in Internet searches even though the user had configured the search engine with this language. This is a fact with a negative impact on the visibility of pages in Catalan.
To become actively involved, the Generalitat de Catalunya commissioned the Alliance to create a device to measure the recent decline of Catalan in Internet searches and to detect similar anomalies in the future in order to claim solutions to digital companies.
Fundació.cat assumed the preparation of an initial report. The report based in gathering objective data of website traffic offering content in Catalan and other languages. The aim of the analytics is to objectively confirm that there is an issue with search engine pages, which are prioritizing contents in different languages than the preferred by the user.
Based on the first results expected on the coming days, the Alliance will present the report to the Government. Together they will decide the roadmap to contact the big digital companies and solve the issue affecting the visibility of content in Catalan on the Internet.
