History
Nunasoft was founded in Canada in 2004. We are based in Montreal. We operate wherever there is a need for maintaining languages, which means: the world.
The motivation for founding Nunasoft
came from the stunning observation that many people around the world, when sitting in front of a computer, do not use their mother tongue.
When asked why, people typically reply: “This computer doesn't know my alphabet”, “The whole system is only available in Spanish, there's not even a single piece of software in my language ”, “I have to use the Roman alphabet because typing in syllabics is too complicated”, “When I send an email to my relatives, I can't even write my language with Roman letters because my parents can't read this alphabet. So I have to switch to English”. This contributes to accelerating a phenomenon known as language shift, which often leads to language death. |
Mission
Just a quick statistics on mother tongues worldwide: 94% of the population speaks 6% of the languages, and vice-versa. It means that an overwhelming majority of languages (94%) is spread among a very small minority of humans (6%).
On one side we have a handful of big-to-superbig languages, on the other side we have lots of small-to-supersmall languages.
Technology industry being both hypercompetitive and fast-paced, companies focus on market segments that generate big and quick revenue: big languages.
This leaves the remaining 94% with little support, if at all, and forces their speakers to shift to a big language. As a side-effect, big languages grow, small languages shrink. With good reason, our motto is “Adapting computers to cultures, not the other way around”. Our products and services are designed with just that in mind. |
