Written language on the web is being shaped by two forces: the growing number of participating voices from around the world, and the social and technical limits of the web to support their languages.

These limits are rarely set up on purpose - languages are forgotten, localization and internationalization are put aside for later, intricacies of database settings go untaught. As a programmer I know how difficult it is to modify a monolingual website or app for many languages. Even building your app from the start with these factors in mind can take a great deal of effort, especially when you consider right-to-left support, multiple fonts, pluralization, and names.

SLANG Group is a reference for the multilingual web. Developers, designers, and interested learners should be able to look up their favorite frameworks and tools, and find the best practices for maximum language support. What data type should I use in MySQL? How do I render map tiles in Cherokee script? Piece by piece, the multilingual web can be collected here.

If this experiment takes off, I will start outreach to developers of major open source projects (Bootstrap, Angular, Rails, Postgres) to make tutorials. I’m hoping to do a crowdfunding project around this in the near future.

Until then, the best way you can help is writing an article or requesting a topic.