LinguaLibre:About/30/en

• Lack of orality: Although languages are essentially spoken (only 4,000 of the world's 7,000 languages have a writing system)$4, knowledge sharing and communication via new information and communication technologies (NICTs) is mainly done in writing, particularly on the web, despite the rich multimedia format it allows. This mediation of the oral through the written word raises many barriers to contribution, such as the use of Unicode characters, the culture of the written word, the orthographic standardisation of the language or the literacy rate of the community.