Introduction

Significance of language preservation. The process of globalization, including changes in the field of language protection, make it necessary to take serious measures in the direction of protection and development of the Azerbaijani language on the digital platform [3, 19, 25]. The studies provided in 2021 indicated that 76.9% of online languages relate to the world's top ten most spoken languages. Studies show that by 2100, half of the world's languages are predicted to be either extinct or on the verge of extinction [21]. Recognizing this threat, UNESCO is leading efforts to preserve local languages and integrate them into the digital world. The aim of this global initiative is to conduct research to examine the barriers that prevent indigenous communities from accessing digital resources and to identify the necessary steps to integrate indigenous languages into digital platforms [21].

Amid increasing efforts towards the formation of the Information Society, most countries are trying to develop digital government solutions with the application of information technologies. Realization of the e-government initiative, besides achieving efficiency in public administration, serves as a platform for preservation of multicultural, religious and linguistic diversity, and requires serious steps to be taken on government level. E-government is a platform to provide government services to citizens as well as other residents of a country, through an internet enabled platform [8].

Objectives of the study. E-government was established as a tool of increasing the efficiency of provided services by strengthening the public sector activity via forming a new information environment [4, 6, 22, 32, 41]. At the same time, capabilities of developing countries to fully use the advantages of e-government are still very low and they face various challenges during realization of e-government projects [42, 43]. These problems include political-administrative, infrastructure, demographic, language and other social factors that play a key role in the efficient management of e-government and development of citizen-centric solutions [2, 42]. Demographic characteristics of citizens such as gender, age, education, social status, language, etc., are the factors that significantly affect users’ behavior and their acceptance and use of e-services. In this regard, multilingualism is one of the most important issues in the development of effective e-government solutions. The development of information technologies and the transformation of the English language into the dominant language on digital platforms limit the possibilities of using e-services for the population, minority peoples and ethnic groups living in the country [32, 40]. In countries with multiple spoken languages along with official state language, such as countries of Indonesia, Nigeria, Cameroon, India, Mexico, Brazil, China etc., operation of e-government sites in dominant language results in inability of most of the population to use said services [35, 37]. Most English-language content on the digital platforms, especially for e-government, makes the problems of protecting language diversity and ensuring multilingualism more urgent.

Globalization and impact on languages

All information is transmitted via signs pertaining to certain languages and cultures. From this point of view, concept of a single information space is of key importance for understanding the dynamics of language changes and has a significant impact on the course of linguistic and cultural processes. Thus, the real areal of the Anglo-American linguistic and cultural space goes far beyond the territories of the respective states due to the enormous coverage of English-language contents and spread of the Internet [10, 12, 23]. The result of the collapse of the USSR was not only changes of a state and socio-political nature, but also noticeable changes in the existing cultural and information space [12]. In this regard, in terms of the impact of globalization on the cultural sphere, it may be noted that linguistic and cultural processes are undergoing more qualitative changes through application of information technologies.

In globalization process, some dominant languages, which is doubtlessly the dominant or in other words - claimant global language, is a real threat to any language [1, 10, 12] . In the information space, due to economic, political and socio-cultural reasons, rapid dissemination of English-language resources far exceeds resources in all other languages. Of course, one of the main features of the modern geo-linguistic map of the world is the undeniable dominance of the English language, which is manifested, among other things, in the sphere of media. Note that, the total volume of English-language media, due to several political, social or cultural reasons, significantly exceeds the volume of media resources in other languages of the world.

English has become the main language of communication in Europe, including Western and Eastern countries. According to the Dutch linguist Fischer [16], role of language as an international communication tool has its negative sides, such as not very high level of proficiency (knowledge), cultural diversity, differences in structure and meaning in different languages; there’s also a fear that other languages will lose their national authenticity and will be dominated by a foreign culture, represented in English.

Starting from 1990s, the dominance of the English language led to the emergence of concepts called "linguistic imperialism", "media imperialism", "cultural imperialism", "information imperialism" or “linguo-cultural” by various researchers and caused discussions in wide audiences [12]. Considering that in the conditions of the information society, linguistic and cultural influences are carried out mostly through media channels, influence of the dominant language on the unified information space, including its impacts on the Azerbaijani segment is also evident. In that connection, the preservation of the Azerbaijani language in integrated information space is a particular issue, and it is imperative to carry out assessments at mentioned geo-linguistic, interlinguistic and intra-linguistic levels and to develop effective mechanisms.

Related works

In the Information Society, advantages of the Internet and rapid development of social media pose a great threat to the preservation of linguistic diversity. In the digital age, the English language, which relies on the strong economy of leading countries such as Great Britain and the United States, global media resources, and a large-scale database, is rapidly penetrating the linguistic space of national languages. Currently, about 60.7% of available Internet resources are in English, 31.5% are mainly in Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, and the remaining 7.8 % are in other languages [3]. The main reason for the dominance of the English language in the world is the rapid development of science, education and technologies in this language, the fact that this language acts as a locomotive of Research and development (R&D) (digital platforms, large-scale contents etc.). According to UNESCO experts trying to objectively assess the linguistic landscape of the planet, 50% to 90% of the world languages can be destroyed or disappear by the end of the XXI century [3, 24]. The study [36] discussed the formation of linguistic demography on the national e-government platform, its problems and solutions. The article shows the complications of establishing linguistic demography, raises different problems and presents certain proposals for their solution. The study reviewed [7] natural language processing problems in Azerbaijani language. The article proposed developing new resources such as annotated corpora, improving machine learning models, and exploring deep learning techniques.

Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity adopted by UNESCO in 2001, reviews a link between biological, cultural and linguistic diversity. Declaration recommends cooperation areas to the Participant States in the following [3]: supporting linguistic diversity and expanding the opportunities for using multiple languages; expanding linguistic diversity on all levels of education, promotion of learning several languages from an early age; incorporating data exchange methods and tools that create full cultural communication opportunities into the traditional education system; promoting public entry to global data network including diversity in cyberspace etc.

In the "Europe-2020" strategy, which defines the directions for sustainable and inclusive development of the EU countries, the effort to consider and protect the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of the society during e-government building in these countries is reflected as one of the main basic principles [14]. E-government environment allows for a solution that warrants the constitutional status and natural development of the state language, the rights of national minorities residing in the country to use their own languages, and unhindered use of e-services by foreigners temporarily living in the country.

The article [9] provides an analytical and structured overview of the different approaches discussed in literature related to the study of linguistic diversity and equality in public administration. The study reviewed public policies implemented in different countries to address such inequalities. The article examines linguistic diversity between members of staff working for government agencies, and how governance models, public policies and public management practices are related to their minimization.

The study [37] is devoted to linguistic diversity issues and the accessibility of marginal groups to Mexican government websites at different levels. This study provides an assessment of the indigenous language provision on Mexican government websites at a government and local level. The study results show that no local indigenous-language content is available from e-government websites, and there are accessibility issues in some regions. Thus, the local population faces digital inequality as well as very difficult living conditions. In the study [27]  researchers have addressed the major challenges and issues involved in the multilingualism aspects while working towards standardization of e-governance solutions in India. The study examines the benefits of adopting open standards and open-source software in implementing multilingual e-governance solutions. Study [20] examined the search behaviours and performance of native and English as a second language speakers while using e-government tasks. The research defined differences between native and English as a second language speakers. The study results shows that significant differences between groups of varying language proficiency in terms of search performance, used time, identification of relevant docs and self-perceived performance and confidence. Table 1 summarises the details of the related work by providing a comparative survey that defines key contributions and outlines some of the features or issues.

• Summarization and classification of texts and speeches in Azerbaijani language (text mining, audio mining etc.).
• Computer-based recognition and analysis of speeches in Azerbaijani language.
• Synthesis of artificial speech from Azerbaijani texts on the computer, developing human-computer (robot, drone etc.) dialog systems (chatbot etc.).
• Determination of emotional tonality of texts and speeches (opinion mining, sentiment analysis etc.).
• Development of good-quality computer translation software between Azerbaijani language and other world languages.
• Development of technologies that allow automatic detection of foreign terminology entering Azerbaijani language through online channels.
• Continuous monitoring and evaluation of ecological condition of Azerbaijani language on digital platforms, developing solutions related to the development of the language.
• Development of national search engine.
• Ensuring the information security of the Azerbaijani language on digital platforms and effective solutions against cybercrime.
• Development different language services on e-government platform.
• Creation national anti-plagiarism applications.

Architectural-technological bases of the language in e-government

New methods, algorithms, approaches must be developed, and a few applications must be developed in order to make national languages a part of the e-government and to ensure the natural development of this platform on all segments. To achieve this goal, it is important to solve the following issues [3]: solving localization (using the national language) and globalization (using the main foreign languages) problems in order to ensure the accessibility of e-government to all citizens and foreigners temporarily living in the country; using the capabilities of e-government platform for language documentation of national minorities residing on the country’s territory; regular evaluation of the existing language situation in the country by analyzing large volume data collected from e-government system; processing intellectual analysis methods of language use, and application of feedback mechanisms in e-government environment, mass media, social media etc.; ensuring the purity of language in the e-government system, spelling, orthography, transliteration, terminology, dialectology issues, names and surnames, vulgarisms, formation of services language industry services (machine translation, speech recognition, language learning and language proficiency level assessment, etc.), such as language national corpus, etc.; solution of technical issues in order to support application of national domain names and multilingual internet; application of proposed models for preservation and development of national languages in a globalization environment.

Formation of an ecosystem for Azerbaijani language in e-government

Being considered the main value of the countries, as well as of the EU, language diversity and freedom of expression in a society are the basic principles of the formation of e-democracy. Note that, although the multilingualism of Europe has a fundamental socio-cultural value, linguistic diversity can be considered a barrier that can significantly affect communication between people [2, 15, 39]. In this regard, maintaining "unity and diversity" is an overlycomplicated issue.

There is several technological solutions to prevent linguistic division or language preservation in online environment. The rapid development of language technologies, such as machine translation, text mining, semantic analysis and speech recognition technologies, enable the elimination of language barriers between people, as well as the preservation of language diversity and the development of multilingualism on digital platforms [5, 13, 19, 39, 44].

The realization of state programs and projects for language protection initiatives on the e-government platform must be carried out on a stage-by-stage basis. Currently, trends in Azerbaijan demonstrate that different organizations and individuals prepare separate language-related application products, for example, national transliteration system [7, 28, 29, 30]. However, these products cannot be widely utilized due to different reasons (commercial etc.). These systems need to be integrated into e-government systems and overall, an ecosystem of Azerbaijani language needs to be established. The integration of language services and systems into the e-government system allows providing various services to citizens with the provision of language diversity, as well as the principle of a single window. The main goal of the e-government concept is to determine the service needs of citizens using modern technologies, create new services, improve existing services and implement a targeted information strategy. Most projects created with the concept of e-government work on the principle of saving resources for both institutions (public and private) and citizens. This has positive results in terms of increasing service speed and quality, as well as providing uninterrupted service. As a result, it will become possible to render complimentary and unlimited Azerbaijani language services (orthography, terminology, dialectology, translation) to society, citizens and everyone on virtual space. These technological innovations must ensure the language policy of the state, i.e. utilization, protection and development of the official state language, including establishment of translation and transliteration relations into other languages. For this reason, it is necessary to provide financial support to state-implemented projects in this field. A conceptual model of the ecosystem of the Azerbaijani language is proposed in Figure 1. As it can be seen, e-government and its functional components must be built according to the requirements of the Azerbaijani language to establish the ecosystem of Azerbaijani language in electronic environment.

Conclusion and future work