I wish to highlight a major challenge to the con nued cultural survival of the North-Frisian minority living in northwestern Germany, namely the lack of digital presence of the language. The Frisians are recognized by Germany as a na onal minority. German law guarantees support and protec on of the Frisian language and culture. It specifically guarantees the possibility to use the Frisian language in contacts with the local- and regional government. North-Frisia [Nord-Friesland] is organized in twelve local governments and one regional government. All these authori es have elaborate websites through which ci zens are informed and where they can access government services. However, none of these websites are in Frisian; not the informa on, nor the services. If you want to interact with the government in Frisian you must go to a physical office. The digital government services that a Frisian speaking ci zen has access to are all in German. The linguis c exclusion also encompasses digital office and produc vity tools, which are unavailable in North-Frisian. An example: the Sorbs are also a recognized na onal minority in Germany. In April 2023, they announced the final incorpora on of the Sorbian language into the Microso1 Office digital products. This joyous feat was the result of a community partnership program where Sorbian cultural organiza ons cooperated with Microso1 engineers in crea ng a language model for Sorbian. We have also shown interest in this community partnership program and Microso1 gave us an overview of what they need in order to create a language model for North-Frisian. This includes one million parallel translated sentences and a great deal of other resources. The North-Frisian community does not possess or receive those levels of resources, which leaves the rights to use North-Frisian in the digital realm truly virtual. At the moment, the North-Frisian community is linguis cally excluded from the digital public sphere. If this digital gap is not closed, the minority rights of the community will be illusionary. We hope that the United Na ons can help linguis c minori es with less resources to bridge the gap between physical and digital presence, thereby ensuring con nued survival of the language. Thank you, Jeroen Zandberg Global Diploma c Council 30 November – 1 December 2023 Forum on Minority Issues 16th Session