As announced a few weeks ago, the Latin Union conference on “Presence, impact and value of Romance languages in the society of knowledge” took place last Friday, April 30, at the Organisation International de la Francophonie, Paris.

On this occasion we met the Director of the Terminology and Language Industries Department of the Latin Union, Mr Daniel Prado, who gave us a presentation of the international organization. He tells us about the context in which the LU was founded, its ongoing missions and objectives.

Image and sound : Nicolas Giuliani

Editing : Caroline Laurent

The conference offered a space to the outlook of linguists and experts on the status of Latin languages, and on the observation of their presence and vitality within different sectors.

It was also the opportunity for the Latin Union to present the launch of their new website. Founded in 2001, PortaLingua was essentially devoted to the description of languages spoken in countries where at least one Latin or Romance language is held as official. Thus the website had elaborated a language description database on a little over 120 languages from Europe, Africa and Latin America. It is now undertaking a new direction.

The purpose of this new version of PortaLingua is to stand as a language status “observatory (…) within the society of knowledge”: cyberspace, science, technique, international organizations, translation, etc. The website offers four different sections meant to evolve in the future:

• Poids des langues (“Language impact”). A classification of the world’s languages according to various factors, elaborated by linguists Alain & Louis-Jean Calvet. An interactive feature for anyone to evaluate the languages they’re interested in.

• The Cyberthèque section aims to raise awareness on how languages are represented in the Internet, a space where being present is essential to any language nowadays.

• The Observatoire (“Observatory”) watches and analyses the presence and status of Latin languages by comparing them to other languages of the world and collecting a significant amount of statistic data.

• Actualités (“News”): news, reviews, publications, etc.

The content of their previous website will not be lost though. It will remain available online for a few more weeks before being permanently transferred to sorosoro.org, to whom the Latin Union has generously donated this precious section of their database.