“There might be an opportunity to create a website with cartoons and content for children,” I tell my colleagues at Ensoul. “That’s great!” they reply instinctively; childhood, for almost everyone, brings back joyful and happy memories. “In Friulian,” I reply. “Oh boy!” they say.
Like me, they know that it will be a terribly delicate operation.
Context:
The ARLeF, the regional agency for the Friulian Language, a minority language protected by law 482, publishes a call for proposals for the creation of a website for children “to encourage bilingualism.” In Friuli, bilingualism has never been a problem, but almost the norm: the number of people who speak both Friulian and Italian is high, higher than the average for minority languages in Europe. What is wanted is to provide a formal incentive tool for this purpose.
But there are many purple elephants in the room:
- Those who think that Friulian is not a language but a “poor” dialect, and do not teach it to their children.
- In the common perception – and this is a mistake, I will discover – there is not “one Friulian”, but a series of sometimes dissonant variants, and difficult to regiment in a shared spelling. Written Friulian is often perceived with hostility, as artificial, and in the various social networks those who try to write it spontaneously invent their own spelling, with results not far from the strictest Klingon and diacritics fired with a cannon: out of a hundred speakers, few are those who can write it correctly – not even I am completely among them; it is a long road, and one that discourages many efforts.
- Any talk about the language itself, the “lenghe furlane”, is seen by the younger generation with an impatient eye roll upwards, “oh no, more chatter about Aquileia and Pasolini”. The funny thing is that, in fact, among young people Friulian is not lacking in popularity or use: Facebook pages like Mataran or Average Furlan Guy are among the most followed and shared in the region.
But at the first mention of “language for the sake of language” everyone stiffens, and perhaps they are not even wrong: talking only about the language is like rapping about rapping. Fine for five minutes, then thank you, next. If the same thing were about Italian, however, I believe the result would be the same: an hour of Dante, even if you are Benigni, is hard.
Months later I will be asked to speak at a debate on Friulian culture: with modesty, I will decline: “here we talk about the roots, and on the roots there are people much more competent than me, who deserve that space. In the tree, I do not deal with the roots but with the leaves and buds, and there is a need for both”.
In my opinion, there is no mass awareness of the risk of the disappearance of the Friulian language, people do not ask themselves the question: there is friction between those who would like to use it lightly, as a family language and as such free from constraints, and those who would instead like to raise it to a delicate butterfly on an academic panoply. For me, who “comes from outside”, it simply seems an incomprehensible quarrel and all about local masochism: it is not up to me (nor to anyone in particular) to provide the burden of proof that this is a language or not; if the European Community has decided so, so far so good. It is a problem that I have rarely seen arise in other communities.
As in many other parts of the world, children suckle the family language from one breast of the mother and the official language from the other. It is as natural as breast milk, and it is an important evolutionary advantage: despite some bland studies aimed at diminishing its real effectiveness, speaking more languages certainly does not narrow the mind, on the contrary.
With the above premises, however, the risk of creating a website that sounded didactic and artificial was high.
“I did it my way” / “in nom di Gjo”
I am at a presentation of Mataran, “le Furlane”, the playing cards designed by local illustrators, and I have the pleasure of meeting Martina Paderni, a talented and versatile illustrator who I haven’t seen for a while. Among the various cards, hers is the one I like the most: I tell her and she Friulianly minimizes, you’re the usual one. A few days later, thanks to her, Elena Guglielmotti comes to our office: she is an art director and illustrator, she has studied ux/ui and would like to have an experience in an agency. It was Martina who directed her to us: with Cecilia Cappelli (and special guest Caterina Di Paolo) they are the members
On my last pre-pandemic trip outside of Italy, I’m at Awwwards in Amsterdam: the most popular three-day web developer event on the planet, a nerdathon that makes me happy and excited to be around all the top artists in my little digital world.
Among the myriad of wonders, I am particularly struck by a project, poetic and technologically sublime, by Wolkswagen, which goes by the name – a bit Klingon this one too – of Snelweg Sprookies, “highway tales”, a storytelling system based on the car’s GPS. The parent attaches the phone to the car’s bluetooth, and it starts telling stories in real time depending on the road traveled. The child in me is smiling enthusiastically, I realize.
The project is a perfect example of how technology can be used to create something beautiful and magical. It is also a reminder that even in the most mundane of activities, there is always room for wonder and imagination.
I am excited to see how this project will evolve in the future. I can imagine a world where every car is equipped with a storytelling system, and children can learn about the world around them as they travel. I can also imagine a world where these stories are personalized to each child, based on their interests and needs.
The possibilities are endless, and I am excited to be a part of this journey.
I realize that if I participate in the ARLeF call for proposals, the project will have to be exactly as I want it, no, excuse me, as the child Fulvio would want it. And the child Fulvio had a happy childhood, but one that was also difficult in terms of health.
And if he wants to do this project, he wants all children to be happy, without excluding anyone.
On the plane, where the first masks are starting to appear, I jot down a list of wishes, which will grow in the following months.
The site must be:
- Simple, colorful, and immediate, because it will be used by children, but without the thousand BOOM BANGS of multinational sites. A quiet treehouse.
- It should allow the parent to leave the phone to their child for half an hour, but not for the whole day; a cartoon binge is not the result we want, we don’t make a profit by creating addiction in consumers: they are children – ours, at that. Every thirty minutes the site stops and invites you to disconnect from the phone.
- It must speak in Friulian, not about Friulian. The topics will be the territory, the cuisine, the game, the fables: the language will be there, but for completeness, as in school, among the other subjects, there is Italian.
- It must be attentive to color blindness: the contrasts between the colors are such as to always make the text readable.
- It must be attentive to dyslexia: we contact a company that produces specific fonts for this case, and we put a switch at the bottom of the site to allow the visualization with a more suitable typeface.
- Still in Holland I had appreciated the site of Moooi, a luxury brand that had the finesse of having the mobile menu draggable depending on whether the user was right or left handed. If your child is naturally left-handed, you don’t want to make them feel bad.
- If the pages will look like old animated pop-up books, let’s also insert the possibility for younger children who cannot yet read to listen to the texts as in an old record player.
- To show the parallelism between the languages, there will be this mode called “explore mode” that will show, by scrolling or with the mouse, how both languages can express the same concept.
- [And here I know I’m going to look for it, but at this point let’s go ahead] no “dad and mom”. “Parents”, or where possible an even more neutral “uncles” as parental figures, like Disney. Not even grandparents, actually: “la lenghe dai nônos” is the most classic rhetorical own goal possible – it immediately makes every language look like Fort Apache falling apart. Hey, I speak Friulian, I’m six years old, Friulian is six years old like me!
- No humans: little animals, all strictly neutral, with huge efforts in the writing of the texts (thanks Enza Purino).
- The navigation will also be characterized by other animals: the caterpillar, whose segmented body looks like a row of call to action buttons, the frog of the “go back to top of page”, the Ghiti that accompanies the passage between pages and so on. The navigation will be fluid, without reloading the page, like an app (thanks barba.js).
Now, go back to the context of before: it is a project that wants to be avant-garde, breaking away from certain traditional patterns. However, I am convinced that if this thing comes out with the Ensoul brand, then it must be like this, even if it means not doing it. If it is our product, it must not dress the desires of anyone but ourselves. I tell this to the others, and I see only nodding heads.
With the BEKKO we draft the project and the graphic proposal: we could easily lose, but their enthusiasm is contagious, it gives me strength. We present it: we will hear from each other in two months.
It is an ordinary afternoon when I am lost in other tasks when an anonymous “din” signals me a PEC: we have won. I make a round of phone calls full of my adolescent enthusiasm, and off we go.
As I go on with the Ghiti project, an idea becomes clearer in my mind: Friulian, like all minority languages, is not an island; technology, for minority languages, is an even more irrepressible necessity than for “official languages”. And in the same way, for minority languages, it is clear that one of the biggest problems is that of content. ARLeF will provide us with a series of consistent content in a series of cartoons translated from other languages, but they cannot last forever and be the only topic of our three-year campaign.
That’s why we decided to take an important step forward and become content builders ourselves. The characters of Ghiti, invented to tell the story of the surrounding environment of Friuli, are each characterized with their own characteristics: Stele sweet and cheerful, Ghiti tender and naive, Ors greedy, Acuile proud and so on. So we create, with the help of Davide Zanelli for the texts, a comic series on the wave of the old Peanuts, with three comics per strip.
But soon the appetite comes with eating, and we decide to turn these comics into videos as well. We work in Javascript and create a tool, rudimentary but effective and economical, to turn the same strips into cartoons. The work is largely manual but it works. Tommaso Urban, who has taken over the social management of the project, gives us some important suggestions [spoiler: soon the cartoons will be in Youtube stories format].
The Ghiti project is a journey of passion, innovation, and dedication. It has demonstrated the power of technology in preserving and promoting minority languages, not just as subjects of study, but as living, breathing tools for communication and creativity.
The project faced numerous challenges, from creating accessible content to adapting traditional formats for new mediums. Yet, through collaboration, ingenuity, and a commitment to inclusivity, Ghiti has successfully created engaging and educational experiences for children across different abilities and backgrounds.
As the project continues to evolve, it serves as a testament to the potential of technology to bridge linguistic barriers, foster cultural understanding, and ensure that the voices of minority communities continue to be heard and celebrated.