More on Indigenous Tweets and social media

We mentioned the website IndigenousTweets.com in an April 2011 post. This website is featured in an article in yesterday's Indian Country Today (thanks to Peter Austin for alerting us to this).

While there are still no Alaskan languages on the tweet list, social media are certainly playing a role in Alaskan language revitalization. One case in point is the recent surge of activity on the Gwich'in Facebook group page, with fairly constant activity over the past month and many posts in Gwich'in.

One thing I find encouraging about the use of indigenous languages in social media is the degree to which orthographic issues are NOT a barrier. Linguists have spent decades debating conventions for writing Native languages, arguing about how to mark features such as tone or vowel quality. Whether to write a velar fricative as x or kh. Whether the palatalized velar ejective stop should be written k'y or ky'. Etc. For many years insistence on the use of special characters and requirements to use proprietary fonts effectively led to a stagnation which left Native languages behind in the pre-computer era. (Anyone remember the dark days of LinguistSoftware fonts?)

Now social media has freed us from these pedagogical constraints and allowed language users and learners to focus on expressing themselves. As is clear from the Gwich'in Facebook posts, the emphasis is on content, not form. And that's a good thing. While linguists fret about spelling and classroom grammar, real language revitalization is happening online.