tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68488824703294188572024-03-14T03:11:34.472-07:00Indigenous TweetsKevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-79202172318415393842016-02-12T09:56:00.000-08:002016-02-12T09:56:12.319-08:00Manx-to-English machine translationA couple of months ago <a href="http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.com/2015/12/riomhaistriuchan-gaidhlig-bearla.html" target="_blank">I posted here</a> about an experiment which involved linking up the <a href="http://www.intergaelic.com/" target="_blank">Intergaelic</a> machine translation system with <a href="http://translate.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Translate</a> to create the first ever Scottish Gaelic to English MT system. Now that I've released Manx Gaelic to Irish MT on Intergaelic, I thought I would try the same experiment.<br />
<br />
Here is the Manx source text I used: <a href="http://www.manxradio.com/news/manx-gaelic/dong-looks-to-manx-waters-for-wind-farm/">http://www.manxradio.com/news/manx-gaelic/dong-looks-to-manx-waters-for-wind-farm/</a><br />
<br />
The Irish translation via Intergaelic:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I trádáil d'fhéadfadh a bheith fiú cúig milliún punt sa bhliain do Manainn, tá Bree-Geayee Dong tar éis tabhairt ainm le comhaontú léasa le rialtas Mhanann, le measúnú limistéar den ghrinneall farraige, amach as cósta thoir an Oileáin.<br /><br />Is céim thábhachtach ach luath sa tionscadal bhí déanta Dé luain, le neart comhchomhairle agus suirbhéanna comhshaoil fós le bheith déanta. Chomh maith leis sin, is éigean aire a thabhairt do na córais d'fhéadfadh feirm ghaoithe déanamh ar raaidyn-lhuingys agus meá iascaireachta.<br /><br />Mar sin féin, má tá an limistéar cuí, d'fhéadfadh Dong tógáil céad muileann gaoithe idir sé agus dhá mhíle dhéag amach as an cósta thoir, ó Rhumsaa go háit ó thuaidh de Lacksey, taobh istigh de cagliagh-marrey an Oileán. Ag an am atá ann, ní eol dóibh cé chomh ard agus bheadh na muilte gaoithe.<br /><br />Tá Dong tar éis ceangal é féin do déanamh roinnt shuirbhéanna den ghrinneall farraige, le fáil amach bheadh sé cuí dó suí tuirbíní.<br /><br />Plean an chomhlacht le tógáil feirm ghaoithe ollmhór amach as cósta theas an Oileáin, An Líonra Ceilteach, bhí sé caite amach mar gheall ar staid an ghrinneall farraige sa limistéar sin.<br /><br />Má gabhfaidh na pleananna ar aghaidh, d'fhéadfadh na muilte gaoithe a bheith ag obair go luath sna blianta fiche. Roimhe sin, beidh ar Dong margadh go rathúil ag mórán comhchomhairle le pobal Mhanann, agus le déanamh staidéir comhshaoil.<br /><br />Benji Sykes, Leas-Uachtarán Dong de Pooar-Geayee an Ríocht Aontaithe, tá sé rá go bhfuil rudaí féachaint le bheith dearfach, ach tá obair fós le déanamh.</blockquote>
<br />
And the resulting English via Google Translate:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="" id="result_box" lang="en"><span title="I trádála d'fhéadfadh a bheith fiú cúig milliún punt sa bhliain do Manainn, tá Bree-Geayee Dong tar éis tabhairt ainm le comhaontú léasa le rialtas Mhanann, le measúnú limistéar den ghrinneall farraige, amach as cósta thoir an Oileáin.
">In trading could be worth five million pounds a year for the Isle of
Man, Bree-Geayee Dong has been giving name to a lease agreement with the
government of Man, the assessment of seabed area, from the east coast
of the Island.<br /></span><span title="Is céim thábhachtach ach luath sa tionscadal bhí déanta Dé luain, le neart comhchomhairle agus suirbhéanna comhshaoil fós le bheith déanta.">But
an important step in the project was made early Monday, with plenty of
consultation and environmental surveys still to be done. </span><span title="Chomh maith leis sin, is éigean aire a thabhairt do na córais d'fhéadfadh feirm ghaoithe déanamh ar raaidyn-lhuingys agus meá iascaireachta.
">Also, is forced to care for the system could do a wind farm and weighing lhuingys raaidyn-fishing.<br /></span><span title="Mar sin féin, má tá an limistéar cuí, d'fhéadfadh Dong tógáil céad muileann gaoithe idir sé agus dhá mhíle dhéag amach as an cósta thoir, ó Rhumsaa go háit ó thuaidh de Lacksey, taobh istigh de cagliagh-marrey an Oileán.">However,
if the relevant area could build Dong windmill between six hundred and
twelve thousand out of the east coast, from north to place Rhumsaa of
Lacksey, within cagliagh-marrey the Island. </span><span title="Ag an am atá ann, ní eol dóibh cé chomh ard agus bheadh na muilte gaoithe.
">At the time there, do not realize how high would the windmills.<br /></span><span title="Tá Dong tar éis ceangal é féin do déanamh roinnt shuirbhéanna den ghrinneall farraige, le fáil amach bheadh sé cuí dó suí tuirbíní.
">Dong has been bound himself to do some surveys of the seabed, found out it would be appropriate for him to sit turbines.<br /></span><span title="Plean an chomhlacht le tógáil feirm ghaoithe ollmhór amach as cósta theas an Oileáin, An Líonra Ceilteach, bhí sé caite amach mar gheall ar staid an ghrinneall farraige sa limistéar sin.
">The company plans to build a massive wind farm off the south coast of
the island, The Celtic Network, he was worn out because of the state of
the seabed in the area.<br /></span><span title="Má gabhfaidh na pleananna ar aghaidh, d'fhéadfadh na muilte gaoithe a bheith ag obair go luath sna blianta fiche.">If the plans entail, the windmills could be at work in the early twenty years. </span><span title="Roimhe sin, beidh ar Dong margadh go rathúil ag mórán comhchomhairle le pobal Mhanann, agus le déanamh staidéir comhshaoil.
">Previously, Dong will successfully market many community consultation Man, and to do environmental studies.<br /></span><span title="Benji Sykes, Leas-Uachtarán Dong de Pooar-Geayee an Ríocht Aontaithe, tá sé rá go bhfuil rudaí féachaint le bheith dearfach, ach tá obair fós le déanamh.">Benji
Sykes, vice president of Dong-Geayee Pooar the UK, it is said that
things look to be positive, but there is still work to be done.</span></span></blockquote>
Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-80173284778230018182015-12-02T09:57:00.000-08:002015-12-02T09:57:36.753-08:00Ríomhaistriúchán Gàidhlig → Béarla(English summary: For fun, I linked up my Scottish Gaelic to Irish machine translation system with Google Translate to produce what may be the first Gàidhlig to English translator. It's not completely terrible.)<br />
<br />
Chruthaigh mé foclóir dátheangach agus inneall aistriúcháin Gàidhlig<i>→</i>Gaeilge i mbliana (an dá rud ar fáil ar an suíomh <a href="http://intergaelic.com/">intergaelic.com</a>, a bhuí le Michal Měchura). Ar son na craice, chuir mé alt randamach ó BBC Alba trí intergaelic le leagan Gaeilge a fháil, ansin an t-aschur trí Google Translate ó Ghaeilge go Béarla. Níl a fhios agam an mbeadh a leithéid seo úsáideach d'éinne; b'fhéidir go mbainfeadh foghlaimeoirí Gàidhlig (gan Gaeilge!) tairbhe as, chun brí ghinearálta atá le scéal nuachta a thuiscint. <br />
Tuigim go bhfuil suim mhór ag roinnt daoine in Albain i gcóras ríomhaistriúcháin Gàidhlig↔Béarla, agus go bhfuil an cheist seo thar a bheith conspóideach (féach <a href="https://multikulti.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/do-minority-languages-need-machine-translation/"><i>Do minority languages need machine translation?</i></a> agus <a href="https://akerbeltzalba.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/the-spectre-of-google-translate-for-gaelic/"><i>The spectre of Google Translate for Gaelic</i></a>). Níor mhaith liom mo ladhar a chur isteach sa díospóireacht sin, seachas a rá go léiríonn an turgnamh beag seo cur chuige éifeachtach amháin.<br />
<br />
Seo é an buntéacs: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/naidheachdan/34973516">http://www.bbc.co.uk/naidheachdan/34973516</a><br />
<br />
Agus an t-aistriúchán uathoibríoch, gan glanadh:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Council liked the Gaeltacht would have to save £ 20m next year.<br />
<br />
They are now saying that there will be £ 40m - after the chancellor's<br />
speech the week went.<br />
<br />
They are saying that this is now an understanding that everything they<br />
are doing to be under scrutiny of the cuts.<br />
<br />
"The Council must save £ 40m over the next year. The huge amount of<br />
money that," said former Chathraiche Resource Committee of Council,<br />
Alasdair Macfhionnghain.<br />
Services<br />
<br />
"It is more than £ 20m as well as our desire was.<br />
<br />
"We need to be viewed services. This is probably a function of cutting services.<br />
<br />
"There are proposals to close them all Council offices Friday evening,<br />
and will probably also the closing schools. We look at things like<br />
that too.<br />
<br />
"Everything must be scrutinized. We need to look at education.<br />
<br />
"We strive to maintain services," he said.<br />
<br />
Council Tax is to be frozen, and did not put up from 2008/09, and that<br />
it focus on budget councils.<br />
<br />
Gaeltacht Council could rise to the condemned, both dtogróidís, but<br />
would spend to pay 30% tax on every £ 1m would get through doing so.<br />
<br />
"We need to go back again to the board, and have everything come under<br />
scrutiny," said Mgr Macfhionnghain.<br />
<br />
"We will talk with the Gaeltacht department and department of<br />
Scotland. We need to talk and see what we have to do," he said.<br />
<br />
Mgr Macfhionnghain said that the Council is likely to apply for the<br />
one over there, see people from the exploitation against the will.<br />
<br />
"At this level, we are not looking for that," he said.<br />
<br />
"But as I said before, we must look at all.<br />
<br />
"And the one over there, must also be viewed as the services.<br />
<br />
"My perspective is also a group of prevention services over the should.<br />
<br />
"We must also viewed.<br />
<br />
"The roads, things like that, and look after our homes.<br />
<br />
"We must look at the costs there," he said. </blockquote>
<br />
<br />Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-44766496352768676792014-12-16T22:10:00.000-08:002014-12-20T20:16:13.901-08:00Atlas Teangeolaíochta don 21ú haois<i>rf/gl ("rófhada/gan léamh"): Ba mhaith liom atlas teangeolaíochta nua-aimseartha a chruthú don Ghaeilge. Má scríobhann tú i nGaeilge ar líne, seol chugam (kscanne ag gmail ponc com) ainm do bhaile dúchais, nó an áit a bhfuair tú do chuid Gaeilge.
</i><b> </b><br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>Wagner 1.0</b> </h3>
Is maith liom léarscáileanna (féach <a href="http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.com/2013/12/mapping-celtic-twittersphere.html" target="_blank">anseo</a> nó <a href="https://twitter.com/kscanne/status/418760565473816578" target="_blank">anseo</a>) agus is maith liom <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/gaeilge.html" target="_blank">an Ghaeilge</a>. Dá bhrí sin is é "<a href="http://books.dias.ie/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=74" target="_blank">Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects</a>" (LASID) le <a href="http://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=1614" target="_blank">Heinrich Wagner</a>, atlas teangeolaíochta don Ghaeilge a foilsíodh i gceithre imleabhar idir 1958 agus 1969, ceann de na leabhair is ansa liom. Bhí sé bunaithe ar shaothar teangeolaíochta a rinne Wagner agus a chomhghleacaithe le cainteoirí dúchais Gaeilge idir 1949 agus 1956. Tá cóip agam anseo sa bhaile, agus is iomaí oíche bhreá chiúin a chaith mé leis thar na blianta.<br />
<br />
Anois ba mhaith liom atlas teangeolaíochta nua a chruthú, ceann a thaispeánfaidh an teanga sa lá atá inniu, go háirithe an teanga mar a úsáidtear ar an Idirlíon agus <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ga/" target="_blank">sna meáin shóisialta</a> í. Dhírigh Wagner et al a n-aird ar chainteoirí dúchais amháin ("... people whose first language had been Irish only, or both Irish and English") agus den chuid is mó ar dhaoine a bhí ina gcónaí sa cheantar céanna i rith a saoil. Ach tá aidhm dhifriúil agamsa, is é sin an teanga mar atá sí á labhairt ag pobal ilchineálach soghluaiste domhanda a léiriú. Mar sin, b'fhearr liom Éireannaigh a d'fhoghlaim an teanga sa scoil agus fiú foghlaimeoirí thar lear a chur san áireamh ar aon chéim le cainteoirí dúchais. Is é "Wagner 2.0" an teideal oibre atá agam ar an togra seo, agus mar sin cuirfidh mé "Wagner 1.0" ar LASID sa díospóireacht thíos.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>Wagner 1.5</b></h3>
Tá dul chun cinn déanta agam air seo cheana, ag baint úsáide as roinnt sonraí atá ar fáil saor in aisce ar an Idirlíon. <br />
<br />
Ar dtús, ba mhaith liom comparáid a dhéanamh idir na léarscáileanna atá in Wagner 1.0 leis na cinn a bheidh bunaithe ar shonraí ón Idirlíon. Dá bhrí sin, rinne mé iarracht domhanleithead agus domhanfhad a aimsiú do na 91 áit atá luaite in Wagner 1.0 (gheobhaidh tú na sonraí sin <a href="https://github.com/kscanne/canuint/blob/master/LASID/LASID.csv" target="_blank">anseo</a> <span class="st">–</span> fáilte roimh cheartúcháin) sa chaoi go mbeinn in ann chuile rud a chur ar taispeáint le chéile ar Google Maps. <br />
<br />
Tá foireann <a href="https://www.ria.ie/publications/books/research-series/focloir-stairiuil-na-nua-ghaeilge.aspx" target="_blank">Fhoclóir Stairiúil na Nua-Ghaeilge</a> in Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann go díreach tar éis <a href="http://research.dho.ie/fng/index.php" target="_blank">go leor seantéacsanna</a> a fhoilsiú ar an suíomh atá acu <span class="st">–</span> níos mó ná 10 milliún focal. Tagann na téacsanna seo le roinnt meiteashonraí, mar shampla ainm an údair, dáta foilsithe, teideal, aicme (prós nó filíocht), srl. Bhain mé úsáid as na meiteashonraí sin chun cuardach a dhéanamh ar gach údar sa chorpas ar an suíomh iontach <a href="http://ainm.ie/">ainm.ie</a>, agus nuair a d'éirigh liom an duine ceart a aimsiú, bhí mé in ann nasc a leanúint ó ainm.ie go dtí a chomhshuíomh <a href="http://logainm.ie/">logainm.ie</a>, ar a bhfuil sonraí faoi áit bhreithe an duine, domhanleithead agus domhanfhad san áireamh. Phew.<br />
<br />
Anois, leis na sonraí seo go léir, is féidir na léarscáileanna as Wagner 1.0 a leathnú agus a shaibhriú go mór. Mar shampla, bhí suim agam in úsáid na bhfocal "feiscint" agus "feiceáil(t)" sna canúintí (lch. 125 in Wagner 1.0). Rinne mé cuardach ar an dá fhocal sa chorpas (na céadta sampla le fáil ann), agus bhí mé in ann iad a cheangal leis na húdair a bhí á n-úsáid, agus ansin áit bhreithe na n-údar a mharcáil ar léarscáil Google Maps. Sin é go díreach an rud atá déanta agam anseo:<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kmzQqGoTDY34" width="540"></iframe>
<br />
<h3>
<b> </b></h3>
Má chliceálann tú an bosca beag ag barr na léarscáile ar an taobh clé, feicfidh tú dhá "shraith" sa léarscáil; ceann amháin leis na sonraí as Wagner 1.0 agus ceann eile leis na sonraí leathnaithe as corpas an Acadaimh, sa chaoi gur furasta comparáid a dhéanamh eatarthu. Ní gá ach an tic in aice le sraith a bhaint chun an tsraith sin a chur i bhfolach.<br />
<br />
Agus seo iad na torthaí nuair a rinne mé an próiseas céanna le "práta/fata/préata":<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kmn0W1L0pV5E" width="540"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Níl an cur chuige seo gan locht ar ndóigh. Seans go bhfuilim ag lorg cáinte trí "Wagner 2.0" a chur ar an
tionscadal seo, nó trí na sonraí ón mbunstaidéar a chur
ar an léarscáil chéanna! Ach tuigim go maith nach ionann cur chuige chomh simplí seo (na milliún focal a bhailiú ó chorpas nó ón Idirlíon) agus an saothar cúramach teangeolaíochta a rinne Wagner sna 1950idí. Mar léiriú amháin ar na fadhbanna seo, thug mé faoi deara go raibh an focal "fata" in úsáid ag údar éigin as Rann na Feirste ar an léarscáil thuas. Nuair a d'fhiosraigh mé an scéal, is éard a bhí ann ná sliocht leis an údar Connachtach Pádraic Ó Conaire as an leabhar "Pádraic Ó Conaire agus Aistí Eile", leabhar de chuid an údair Chonallaigh Seosamh Mac Grianna. Nó, feicfidh tú an focal "feiscint" sa Tuaisceart ar an teorainn in aice leis an Srath Bán i gContae Thír Eoghain. Tháinig an sampla seo ó "An Béal Bocht" le Myles na gCopaleen <span class="st">–</span> is dócha gur sórt aithrise ar an mblas Muimhneach a bhí ann, ar son an ghrinn. Agus ar ndóigh bhí Wagner ag lorg an fhocail a d'úsáideadh i gcomhthéacsanna ar leith, rud nach féidir liom a dhéanamh trí chuardach simplí a dhéanamh i gcorpas gan marcáil shéimeantach.<br />
<br />
Is léir go mbeadh sé an-deacair an cineál seo truaillithe a sheachaint, ach is cuma liom i ndáiríre. Baintear úsáid as focail chanúna ar fháthanna éagsúla, uaireanta ar son grinn nó magadh a dhéanamh, uaireanta, b'fhéidir, chun cumarsáid a éascú nó fáilte a chur roimh dhuine ina chanúint féin. Creidimse go mbaineann castacht den chineál sin le húsáid teangacha i gcónaí, agus gur gá dul i ngleic leis an gcastacht seo seachas neamhaird a dhéanamh di. Agus is dócha go bhfuil úsáid na Gaeilge ar an Idirlíon níos casta fós! Cé go dtaitníonn an t-ainm "Wagner 2.0" go mór liom, mar ómós do cheann de na leabhair is ansa liom, is é ainmhí go hiomlán difriúil atá á chruthú anseo!<br />
<h3>
<b> </b></h3>
<h3>
<b>Wagner 2.0</b></h3>
Mar is gnáth, níl aon deontas agam don togra seo, ná go leor ama le caitheamh air, agus mar sin braithfidh mé oraibh, pobal na Gaeilge ar líne, chun teacht i gcúnamh orm. Más mian leat páirt a ghlacadh, seol ríomhphost chugam (kscanne ag gmail ponc com), agus tabhair ainm do bhaile dúchais dom, nó an áit a bhfuair tú do chuid Gaeilge. Má tá blag nó cuntas Twitter agat, bheinn buíoch díot as nasc leis an mblag agus/nó ainm do chuntais Twitter. Déanfaidh mise gach rud eile! Ní úsáidfidh mé d'ainm nó sonraí pearsanta ar chor ar bith <span class="st">– nílim ag iarraidh ach rud amháin a dhéanamh: focail Ghaeilge a cheangal le pointí ar léarscáil.</span><br />
<b></b><br />
<h3>
<b>Buíochas</b></h3>
Tá mé an-bhuíoch de <a href="https://twitter.com/momeachair" target="_blank">Mhícheál Johnny Ó Meachair</a> as go leor leor comhráite ar an ábhar seo agus as a chuid moltaí stuama, agus<b> </b>de <a href="http://www.akerbeltz.org/index.php?title=Pr%C3%AComh_dhuilleag" target="_blank">Michael Bauer</a> as na léarscáileanna ar a shuíomh álainn <a href="http://faclair.info/">faclair.info</a> a spreag mé chun tabhairt faoin togra craiceáilte seo!<br />
<br />
<h3>
Aguisín</h3>
Tuilleadh léarscáileanna - Nollaig shona daoibh!<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kRkYVBfLLpw4" width="540"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kBdUCLWqWeUE" width="540"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kTA-ro7ZW-04" width="540"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/embed?mid=zCNAVk5tljII.kcI3d9g24ruU" width="540"></iframe>
Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-35710748585716407642014-04-29T07:31:00.000-07:002014-04-29T07:31:50.624-07:00Social media in bilingual environments: online practices of Frisian teenagers<i> The following is a guest post by <a href="https://twitter.com/lysbeth2_0" target="_blank">Lysbeth Jongbloed</a>, researcher at the <a href="http://www.fryske-akademy.nl/" target="_blank">Fryske Akademy</a>, specializing in the use of the Frisian language in social media. We're grateful to Lysbeth for taking the time to share her research with us!</i><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span>
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<i><br /></i>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj01O0JYMC_21kCTfglEBc3qhfaDizvk0snZZdXehJe0AN5sFYg-Pme1bX3YY9sG1adZe5JsFwT5etsr4ZXVeHISTkfI-_eSX6ENcgpjITPgR78wXfYsskewSiUEyk0NfBzRvnfJjCYYg/s1600/IMG_7466.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj01O0JYMC_21kCTfglEBc3qhfaDizvk0snZZdXehJe0AN5sFYg-Pme1bX3YY9sG1adZe5JsFwT5etsr4ZXVeHISTkfI-_eSX6ENcgpjITPgR78wXfYsskewSiUEyk0NfBzRvnfJjCYYg/s1600/IMG_7466.JPG" height="200" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lysbeth Jongbloed</td></tr>
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Probably most of you know the Netherlands: from tulips, clogs, or Amsterdam. Most people in the Netherlands speak Dutch, a West Germanic language. However, in the north of the Netherlands, in the province of Fryslân, we speak a different language: Frisian. Frisian is, besides Dutch, the second officially recognised language in the Netherlands. In Fryslân, the legal status of Frisian and Dutch are equal, however, in practice, in many domains Dutch is the dominant language and also in many schools, education in Frisian is rather limited. It is estimated that Frisian is the mother tongue for around half of the Frisian population, roughly some 350,000 people. Frisian is mainly a spoken language: while 85% of the population can speak the language, only 12% indicate that they can write the language well (<a href="http://www.fryslan.nl/taalatlas" target="_blank">De Fryske Taalatlas</a>, 2011).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Pz4ki1xq-DPjUCs5p9v2tvZ0u4jB_Di5s_OGt3FjAPgRdj5x3lUQx0sa1rltsqqn9vG9JTmdQmRoszqGt0odnVSjz28d79pllEM3xxi9Og_DmJwCOUsH3cQE8G0NfT6kg1AZxoJXmw/s1600/fy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Pz4ki1xq-DPjUCs5p9v2tvZ0u4jB_Di5s_OGt3FjAPgRdj5x3lUQx0sa1rltsqqn9vG9JTmdQmRoszqGt0odnVSjz28d79pllEM3xxi9Og_DmJwCOUsH3cQE8G0NfT6kg1AZxoJXmw/s1600/fy.png" height="320" width="320" /></a>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frisian Twitter conversations; map by Indigenous Tweets</td></tr>
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<b>Research in Fryslân</b><br />
<br />
In Fryslân, the Mercator Research Centre and the Fryske Akademy carry out fundamental and applied research in the fields of the Frisian language, culture, history and society. One of the current projects studies language use on social media. The expectation is that social media offer chances for minority languages to increase their vitality. <br />
<br />
In 2013 and early 2014 the Mercator Research Centre received financial support from the Province of Fryslân and the municipality of Leeuwarden (capital of Fryslân) to research the language use of Frisian teenagers between 14 and 18 on social media. The outcomes of this research will be discussed below. Are you also studying the use of your minority language on the internet? We are interested in setting up an international network so we can compare results and initiate European funded projects in the future. Read more about these plans at the end of this blog. <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
JAAAA! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Frysk&src=hash">#Frysk</a> is TRENDING TOPIC! It <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Frysk&src=hash">#Frysk</a> is de baas op Twitter! Lokwinske allegear! :) <a href="http://t.co/n3Ah9C0Vpe">pic.twitter.com/n3Ah9C0Vpe</a><br />
— Praat mar Frysk (@PraatmarFrysk) <a href="https://twitter.com/PraatmarFrysk/statuses/456698187990831105">April 17, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">#frysk was the #1 trending topic in the Netherlands for 7 hours on April 17th</td></tr>
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<b>WhatsApp most popular social media platform</b><br />
<br />
Twenty Frisian schools for secondary general and vocational education participated in the research. As a result, over 2,000 Frisian teenagers filled in an extensive questionnaire. Almost all Frisian teenagers (98%) use social media. 95% of the teenagers use WhatsApp (a cross-platform mobile messaging app), 86% use Facebook and 76% use Twitter. Of the three, WhatsApp is used most: 47% chose the answer 'only when I am asleep, I do not check WhatsApp'.<br />
<b><br />Oral rather than written language</b><br />
<br />
In general it can be concluded that Frisian still is rather an oral than a written language. For Frisian teenagers the Dutch language is the dominant language used in writing. On average, the more formal the medium, the less often Frisian is used. For instance, for text messages and WhatsApp approximately half of the Frisian-speaking teenagers use Frisian. On Facebook and Twitter that proportion decreases to around 30%, and in emails it is 15%. In personal messages Frisian is used more than in public or group messages. <br />
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<b>Phonetical writing</b><br />
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Frisian is often written phonetically. Most teenagers are aware of that but do not mind: 'People will understand what I mean anyway.' Some think it is too much work to add all diacritics, others are not sure when to use them. Furthermore, the influence of Dutch is clearly visible in the teenagers' written language, and so is the use of dialect and abbreviations that are typical of social media. It also often happens that different languages are mixed intentionally.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Ek de Wâldpiken dogge hjoed mei oan de Fryske Twitterdei! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Frysk&src=hash">#Frysk</a> <a href="http://t.co/eh8c1S6DlM">pic.twitter.com/eh8c1S6DlM</a><br />
— Praat mar Frysk (@PraatmarFrysk) <a href="https://twitter.com/PraatmarFrysk/statuses/456705393083703296">April 17, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Teenagers from the ‘Walden’ region use Frisian most on social media</td></tr>
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<b>Regional differences</b><br />
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In the province of Fryslân, big differences have been found regarding Frisian language use. In general, Frisian is hardly used in the big cities while it is much more common to use Frisian on social media in smaller towns and in the north-east of Fryslân. <br />
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<b>Determining factors</b><br />
<br />
The language one prefers to speak is the main factor determining one's language use on social media. Other factors affecting language choice are one's attitude towards Frisian, one’s writing skills in Frisian, and the general attitude towards Frisian at one's school.<br />
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Approximately one fifth of the Frisian-speaking teenagers never uses Frisian on social media. The main reason is that they find it difficult to write Frisian, but it also has to do with their surroundings not being Frisian and their own attitude towards Frisian.<br />
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<b>Qualitative Twitter research</b><br />
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Besides mapping language use of Frisian teenagers by means of a questionnaire, I also studied tweets of 50 Frisian teenagers. The 50 teenagers for the Twitter research were selected from the participants of the second ‘Fryske Twitterdei’ (Frisian Twitter day), which was organised on April 18th 2013 by the organisation ‘Praat mar Frysk’ (Do speak Frisian). During this day people were encouraged to send Frisian tweets in combination with the hashtag Frysk. The whole day #Frysk was a trending topic in the Netherlands, and almost 10,000 tweets were sent with the hashtag Frysk. Per participant, their last 50 tweets before the Twitter day, their tweets on the Twitter day, and their first 50 tweets after the Twitter day were analysed: in total over 6,000 tweets. <br />
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<b>Share of Frisian tweets</b><br />
<br />
The analysis shows that on regular days, just over 10% of the tweets were in Frisian and 65% were in Dutch. On the Frisian Twitter day 53% was in Frisian and 29% in Dutch. Although the Twitter day has a strong upwards effect on the use of Frisian in tweets, the effect is not long-lasting.<br />
<b><br />Variables of influence on language choice</b><br />
<br />
Variables of influence on language choice are the type of tweet and gender. The proportion of Frisian is highest in messages addressed to a particular person. On regular days 25% of those tweets are in Frisian. On the Twitter day the proportion doubles to almost half. The use of Frisian in other type of messages rises from under 10% to over 50%. In the analysed sample, the male teenagers tweet much more in Frisian than their female counterparts.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
It is poëij-woansdei! Op de wize fan ’Wat bisto leafkik…’ Sjong mar mei! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Frysk&src=hash">#Frysk</a> <a href="http://t.co/4JcrIpu6nn">pic.twitter.com/4JcrIpu6nn</a><br />
— Praat mar Frysk (@PraatmarFrysk) <a href="https://twitter.com/PraatmarFrysk/statuses/456306579680145408">April 16, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Every Wednesday @praatmarfrysk tweets a Frisian poem. On April 16th it was a poem about the Twitter Day.</td></tr>
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<b>Frisian Twitter day 2014</b><br />
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Last week, on April 17th, the third Frisian Twitter day was organised: again the Twitter day was a big success: during the whole day it was a trending topic in the Netherlands and during seven hours it even was the number one trending topic. Over 6 million people saw the #Frysk or #frysketwitterdei on their timeline, tweets came from over 25 countries.<br />
<b><br />Further research</b><br />
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The Province of Fryslân has granted a new subsidy to the Mercator Research Centre of the Fryske Akademy to carry out further research into Frisian language use on social media in 2014 and 2015; in particular, the question will be addressed what dynamics in a multilingual society lead to the use or non-use of a minority language on social media. To answer this question, we are also looking for partners in other minority language regions with whom we can compare research outcomes. Consequently we would like to build up an expert network to initiate European funded projects in the future. Please contact <a href="https://twitter.com/lysbeth2_0" target="_blank">@lysbeth2_0</a> if you are interested to participate. For more information about the Frisian Twitter day, you can contact <a href="https://twitter.com/praatmarfrysk" target="_blank">@praatmarfrysk</a>.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-31820807191288331362014-02-27T10:43:00.000-08:002014-04-27T20:54:46.599-07:00Indigenous Tweets #IMLD14 RoundupLast Friday February 21st was <a href="http://www.un.org/en/events/motherlanguageday/" target="_blank">International Mother Language Day</a>, a celebration of linguistic diversity originally created by UNESCO in 1999. This year, together with <a href="http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2014/02/17/tweet-in-your-mother-language-on-february-21/" target="_blank">Rising Voices</a> and the <a href="http://livingtongues.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/tweet-in-your-mother-language-on-february-21/" target="_blank">Living Tongues Institute</a>, we tried to encourage people to tweet in their native language using the hashtag #imld14 (#dilm14 in Spanish). We were thrilled with the response, and you can see some of the many tweets by searching for <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=typd&f=realtime" target="_blank">#imld14 on Twitter</a>, or by checking out the <a href="https://storify.com/risingvoices/imld-words-and-phrases" target="_blank">Storify</a> created by Laura Morris from Rising Voices. <br />
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For fun, I looked specifically at tweets written in any of the 157 languages we're tracking on the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/" target="_blank">Indigenous Tweets site</a>. In all, there were 491 tweets containing #imld14 or #dilm14, written in 31 of the 157 languages. Leading the way were <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/gd/" target="_blank">Gàidhlig</a> with 158 tweets, followed by 74 tweets in <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/an/" target="_blank">Aragonese</a>, 45 in <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/oj/" target="_blank">Ojibwe/Nishnaabemwin</a>, 41 in <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/mg/" target="_blank">Malagasy</a>, and 28 in <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ga/" target="_blank">Irish/Gaeilge</a>.<br />
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One of the primary goals of the Indigenous Tweets project is to get people to use their language <i>every day</i> on Twitter and other social media sites. We hope that a few of you
who did this for the first time for #imld14 will continue to tweet in
your native language and encourage others in your community to do the
same. <br />
<br />
For additional inspiration, we'll close with a sampling of tweets in a few other languages. Looking forward to an even better turnout for #imld15!!<br />
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Chichewa:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Malongosoledwe ndi Zosatira za Ndondomeko Yogwiritsa Ntchito Chiyankhulo Chachibadwa mMaphunziro m'Malawi <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ny&src=hash">#ny</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=hash">#imld14</a> <a href="http://t.co/QxcDSjHOTm">http://t.co/QxcDSjHOTm</a><br />
— Edmond Kachale (@ceekays) <a href="https://twitter.com/ceekays/statuses/436173318010331136">February 19, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Nahuatl:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23dilm14&src=hash">#dilm14</a> Monequi <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Nahuatlahtolli&src=hash">#Nahuatlahtolli</a> ontla'totiuh telpochmachtilcalco. Yu'quin totelpopochtin a'mo quimpoloz totlamatilizhuan.<br />
— Rodrigo Chacón (@Soyuntamal) <a href="https://twitter.com/Soyuntamal/statuses/437065762688090112">February 22, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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Manx Gaelic:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/JamysJeheiney">@JamysJeheiney</a> s'mie lhiam geaishtagh rish <a href="https://twitter.com/juliefowlis">@juliefowlis</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23manx&src=hash">#manx</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23gaelg&src=hash">#gaelg</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kiaull&src=hash">#kiaull</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23IMLD&src=hash">#IMLD</a><br />
— Chris Williamson (@FeerVaynrey) <a href="https://twitter.com/FeerVaynrey/statuses/436912910263402496">February 21, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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Lezgian:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
ВацIун рикIелай булахар фида, гьуьлуьн рикIелай – вацIар <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=hash">#imld14</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Lezgian&src=hash">#Lezgian</a><br />
— Лезги Лугьунар (@LezgiQuotes) <a href="https://twitter.com/LezgiQuotes/statuses/436750698358013952">February 21, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Karuk:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
. <a href="https://twitter.com/CASottile">@CASottile</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/FirstPeoples">@FirstPeoples</a> Nixuti pu'thiinatihar pa'úuhyan 'peace' pa nanuhihaak. <a href="https://twitter.com/JulianKaruk">@JulianKaruk</a> fáat ixuti? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=hash">#imld14</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Karuk&src=hash">#Karuk</a><br />
— Susan Gehr (@vurayav) <a href="https://twitter.com/vurayav/statuses/436936220518539264">February 21, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Nez Perce:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
núunim héesin titooqatímtki péelleheype híiwes. Our breath is with language everyday. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nezperce&src=hash">#nezperce</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=hash">#imld14</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23risingvoices&src=hash">#risingvoices</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23liveyourlanguage&src=hash">#liveyourlanguage</a><br />
— Phil Cash Cash (@weyiiletpu) <a href="https://twitter.com/weyiiletpu/statuses/436891551315140608">February 21, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
North Sámi:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Odne lea riikkaidgaskasaš eatnigiela beaivi! Lihkku beivviin! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NorthSami&src=hash">#NorthSami</a> (International Mother Language Day 2014) <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23imld14&src=hash">#imld14</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/samiallaskuvla">@samiallaskuvla</a><br />
— Jelena Porsanger (@JPorsanger) <a href="https://twitter.com/JPorsanger/statuses/436774430883467265">February 21, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Māori: <br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Kāore au e whakapākehātia. Mā tēnei mea pea e whakamārama taku kōrero :) <a href="http://t.co/cPm1Gmchde">http://t.co/cPm1Gmchde</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Imld14&src=hash">#Imld14</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23M%C4%81ori&src=hash">#Māori</a><br />
— K.H. (@landkatia) <a href="https://twitter.com/landkatia/statuses/437077100122472448">February 22, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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<br />Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-19845635745582608422013-12-29T08:58:00.001-08:002013-12-29T08:58:21.628-08:00Mapping the Celtic TwittersphereOver the last couple of weeks I've created maps showing the Twitter conversations taking place in the <a href="https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/408938246412853248" target="_blank">Irish</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/413727705348075522" target="_blank">Basque</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/413467362520604672" target="_blank">Māori</a> languages. The inspiration for this came from an email conversation with Paora Mato from the University of Waikato in Aotearoa, who has co-authored (with Te Taka Keegan) an excellent analysis of the Māori Twitter community based on data from Indigenous Tweets (forthcoming). Since people seemed to enjoy the maps I decided to do similar ones for the other Celtic languages (Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx Gaelic, Cornish, and Breton) which you'll find below.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdZsxJGN1p4AcFfjbbTX_sG6VuStCiSFRC_bhqEjcAjQpa2KOKGSnZ63DKwByISETnyZY-kVGeR6v5KGG2q7BBNd6KvpqNsoWOHCF5g11AjVkStQK7ZMMh8E7UZ4Ax6M2WXFzsX1pUnw/s1600/convos-cy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdZsxJGN1p4AcFfjbbTX_sG6VuStCiSFRC_bhqEjcAjQpa2KOKGSnZ63DKwByISETnyZY-kVGeR6v5KGG2q7BBNd6KvpqNsoWOHCF5g11AjVkStQK7ZMMh8E7UZ4Ax6M2WXFzsX1pUnw/s320/convos-cy.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Welsh language Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
These maps were all created in more-or-less the same way. I started with the lists of people tweeting in each language from the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/" target="_blank">Indigenous Tweets</a> site – the site includes everyone tweeting in the smaller languages like Breton, Cornish, and Māori, and the top-500 most active users for Irish, Basque, Welsh, etc.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNoS7WcqWiP-Q_1V7a2_xfyWbh2EZSXUpgpi-m4Ydd-3e2SURafVZK4Z8iBalHZoseNsYrZJcCax8NhziHB6PwjiNRVlvYWq2Ovs_SyAxJNcfEF_6TuIOSRJ-eP8vP7V0qs9UTFwJBsQ/s1600/ga-domhanda.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNoS7WcqWiP-Q_1V7a2_xfyWbh2EZSXUpgpi-m4Ydd-3e2SURafVZK4Z8iBalHZoseNsYrZJcCax8NhziHB6PwjiNRVlvYWq2Ovs_SyAxJNcfEF_6TuIOSRJ-eP8vP7V0qs9UTFwJBsQ/s320/ga-domhanda.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Irish language Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Next, a small percentage of Twitter users have <i>geolocation</i> activated for their tweets, which means that when they tweet from a mobile device, a latitude and longitude are recorded in Twitter's database along with the tweet. These coordinates are then accessible to developers like me through the <a href="http://dev.twitter.com/" target="_blank">Twitter API</a>. For users without geolocation activated, I just collected the (self-reported) location from their Twitter profile, canonicalized the placenames, and looked up the lat/longs in a database. For these users, I assumed that all of their tweets were sent from the resulting location. This means, for example, that all tweets from people whose profile location is set to "Dublin", "Baile Átha Cliath", "BÁC", or variants thereof will appear to come from one particular location near the center of the city – whatever's in the database (as it happens, it's the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spire_of_Dublin" target="_blank">Dublin Spire</a>). This isn't really a problem since I'm only interested in creating maps at the level of countries or continents.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwnbmd_KDZtMZNGNjFvYCq1u_GfJb-nnfLmCdofvVz5__1wpEk2tCh28f4OrSaB092-FlI599CUSqUfyMDA5uV-Jae-8PznWaLBYUidSlJkvFvpeR7RvC8EXyq7fbWvsiKnM5t2rmaTw/s1600/gd-domhanda.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwnbmd_KDZtMZNGNjFvYCq1u_GfJb-nnfLmCdofvVz5__1wpEk2tCh28f4OrSaB092-FlI599CUSqUfyMDA5uV-Jae-8PznWaLBYUidSlJkvFvpeR7RvC8EXyq7fbWvsiKnM5t2rmaTw/s320/gd-domhanda.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scottish Gaelic Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Canonicalizing the placenames takes a bit of manual labor, for a few reasons. First, sometimes people will give their location in their profile as something like "American ex-pat living in Galway", and the geolocation services I've tried usually fail on strings like this. Second, many people tweeting in indigenous or minority languages give their location in their native language, and for languages like Welsh, Cornish, Māori and so on, these names are often missing from geolocation databases. Finally, there are misspellings and other noise in people's profiles that are best handled manually.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtPdtoCHIq25rflxpHt_9AKJFkyP6Be0tJ0vC2OF3ruy12YdtS9Tkdr0tzT3wgEfLWm8jujVeny-KBEDJUPKL1Ypu10VGlG6Px2CfqBuQeDznaLoyhvfpxnkRn-u3N2F59UlJt9YIa6A/s1600/gd-breatain-eire.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtPdtoCHIq25rflxpHt_9AKJFkyP6Be0tJ0vC2OF3ruy12YdtS9Tkdr0tzT3wgEfLWm8jujVeny-KBEDJUPKL1Ypu10VGlG6Px2CfqBuQeDznaLoyhvfpxnkRn-u3N2F59UlJt9YIa6A/s320/gd-breatain-eire.png" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scottish Gaelic, Great Britain and Ireland only (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
So at this point I have good coordinates for between 50-60% of the users listed on the Indigenous Tweets pages. I then gather all tweets from the database that are in the desired language and in which one user "mentions" another. In the case that I have coordinates for both the sender and the mentioned user, I simply draw an arc of a great circle on the map connecting the two points. I rendered the maps using the statistical package R, which has libraries that make this sort of thing very easy (nice tutorial <a href="http://flowingdata.com/2011/05/11/how-to-map-connections-with-great-circles/" target="_blank">here</a>, for example).<br />
<br />
It's very common for a large number of conversations to take place between two specific points. For example, there have been 5878 Welsh language tweets sent from Caerdydd that mention a user in Caernarfon, and 1519 Irish language tweets sent from An Cheathrú Rua that mention a user in Baile Átha Cliath. In such cases, I've scaled the brightness of the arcs so that these frequent paths show up more prominently on the maps.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNOgdThOQWyQLN9aB_SpQgJmay9lXj96P_Ya_1SXaqktAvVf7ArR5pHxVYjUXkh4PCc7jgmAIyIdIG0Kqk3sxMGNLkXU7DMzgXnAZvzrjDQIiXEfSzhyWqSavNDeJz7PZLZJj1FrgzpA/s1600/br-convos.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNOgdThOQWyQLN9aB_SpQgJmay9lXj96P_Ya_1SXaqktAvVf7ArR5pHxVYjUXkh4PCc7jgmAIyIdIG0Kqk3sxMGNLkXU7DMzgXnAZvzrjDQIiXEfSzhyWqSavNDeJz7PZLZJj1FrgzpA/s320/br-convos.png" width="309" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Breton language Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm not a linguist or sociolinguist so it's not really my place to draw conclusions about linguistic geography, language vitality, or anything else from these maps.<b> </b>It's best to leave this to members of the language communities themselves, who will have the best understanding of the local situation. That said, I want to address a couple of issues people raised on Twitter after I posted the Irish, Basque and Māori maps.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjd14dbrPo2Z88eGsUqeaoHI6zTCgI4FIAtHy0v6MkM4GxtcwOwgIzPTXBryOi3kWZzMnhvKs9yLo26efeEbK-5N3mStxo-wwyMiAAHHl0rNyyCJTfd0QO4GVenhAv2w057kES5sZ0Dw/s1600/kw-convos.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjd14dbrPo2Z88eGsUqeaoHI6zTCgI4FIAtHy0v6MkM4GxtcwOwgIzPTXBryOi3kWZzMnhvKs9yLo26efeEbK-5N3mStxo-wwyMiAAHHl0rNyyCJTfd0QO4GVenhAv2w057kES5sZ0Dw/s320/kw-convos.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cornish language Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The most striking thing about <a href="https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/413727705348075522" target="_blank">the Basque map</a> is how compact it is geographically, especially when compared to the Irish map where we see many conversations between Ireland, North America, continental Europe and even Brazil. In contrast, all of the Basque conversations take place within the Basque Country, roughly speaking. And the Welsh map, which appears here for the first time, looks much more like the Basque map than the Irish one, with just a small percentage of tweets involving a user outside of Wales, most of those to and from London. Does this mean that somehow Irish is a more "international" language than the other two, or that the Irish-speaking diaspora is more engaged with the language? It might, but more careful research would be needed to establish this. My guess is that the Welsh and Basque communities look more compact in part because I'm only displaying the top-500 users in each case. Since these languages have such vibrant communities on Twitter, the bar is set extremely high to make it into the top-500 tweeters (currently, the 500th most active tweeter in Welsh has 1073 tweets in the language, for Basque the number is 1958, but for Irish it's just 176), and I expect that users with thousands of tweets in the language are more likely to live in the traditional homeland where the language is still used on a daily basis by the local community.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzOda_odDISftB4oS1lGHk8X_DycCIjHlNPlIOLi9_tyP2BsprGZ8-hW_p9UI5ovPQ4yW_OIShjJ3cRJtEzFIjta6tE3ZvRPRGGHLaNaQoRo_FEgjh_gS6jT94oQqEmkvGEjAy1V0tcQ/s1600/gv-convos.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzOda_odDISftB4oS1lGHk8X_DycCIjHlNPlIOLi9_tyP2BsprGZ8-hW_p9UI5ovPQ4yW_OIShjJ3cRJtEzFIjta6tE3ZvRPRGGHLaNaQoRo_FEgjh_gS6jT94oQqEmkvGEjAy1V0tcQ/s320/gv-convos.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Manx Gaelic Twitter conversations (CC-BY-SA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
A word or two regarding the Manx map. Of the six Celtic languages, Manx has the smallest number of users on Twitter and probably the smallest number of speakers also. Several users have "Isle of Man", "Ellan Vannin" (or variants thereof) as their location (and no more specific location on the island). Because of this, I normalized all locations on the island to a single lat/long, and therefore (disappointingly) the map doesn't show what I expect is actually an interesting network of communication taking place on the island; instead it just shows the conversation pathways between the island and three users off the island.<br />
<br />
Finally, a word about privacy. I haven't plotted locations at a granularity finer than a city or town except in cases where users have explicitly activated geolocation for their tweets. And even in those cases, since the maps are at a pretty large scale, it's impossible to pinpoint the exact location of any particular user. That said, not everyone will be so scrupulous with your data, and if the idea of a stranger plotting your movements on a map creeps you out (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html" target="_blank">I think it should</a>), you should deactivate geolocation on your Twitter account (under Settings, go to "Security and Privacy", and then make sure the box next to "Add location to my tweets" is unchecked). If you don't want anyone to know where you are at all, you can also remove your location from your Twitter profile (Settings →
Profile →
Location). And if you don't want sites like Indigenous Tweets to have access to your tweets at all, the easiest solution is to make your Tweets private (Settings →
Profile, and tick the box next to "Protect my tweets").<br />
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<br />
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<br />Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-59218978085729317592012-10-15T12:45:00.001-07:002012-10-15T12:45:32.575-07:00Facebook in your languageIt's been a long time since I posted anything here. The Indigenous Tweets project is still going strong, and the number of languages we're tracking on Twitter continues to grow - we added the 138th and 139th languages (<a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/smn/" target="_blank">Inari</a> and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/sma/" target="_blank">South Saami</a>) to the site a couple of weeks ago. Last week, the team at Twitter was nice enough to feature Indigenous Tweets on their "<a href="http://stories.twitter.com/" target="_blank">Twitter Stories</a>" site; you can read that piece <a href="http://stories.twitter.com/en/lostlang.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Since January, I've spent a lot of time working on another project aimed at encouraging indigenous language groups to use their languages in social media. What we're trying to do is produce translations of Facebook's interface (the menus, navigation, etc.) into as many languages as possible.<br />
<br />
You may be aware that Facebook has <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=100117036792266" target="_blank">a nice system in place</a> that allows volunteers to translate the site into about 100 different languages, including a number of languages that we care about here, like Irish, Cherokee, Northern Sámi, and Aymara. This is about the same as the number of language teams currently translating <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html" target="_blank">Mozilla Firefox</a> (105) and somewhat less than the number of languages the Google search interface is available in (150). <br />
<br />
The trouble is, neither Facebook nor Google has added any new languages to their translation systems for quite a while. In the case of Google, this is stated explicity in their <a href="http://www.google.com/transconsole/giyl/check/staticfile?staticfilekey=faq" target="_blank">translation FAQ</a>: "Right now, we're unable to support more languages in GIYL". We haven't been able to reach anyone at Facebook about this, but we've heard second-hand that they have had problems with <a href="http://news.softpedia.com/news/Attackers-Abuse-Facebook-s-Translation-Application-149771.shtml" target="_blank">spam translations</a> and poor quality from some of the smaller translation teams. Whatever the reason, there are hundreds of language groups out there actively using Facebook to communicate in their language, but who are forced to use the site in English, Spanish, etc. This flies in the face of Facebook's <a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=59043607130" target="_blank">stated aim</a> to "make Facebook available in every language across the world".<br />
<br />
To solve this problem for his own language of Secwepemctsín, the late <a href="http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.com/2011/07/rip-neskie-manuel.html" target="_blank">Neskie Manuel </a>came up with a clever solution using a technology called <a href="http://www.greasespot.net/" target="_blank">Greasemonkey</a>. His code acts as a kind of "overlay" that runs in your web browser; as you navigate pages on Facebook, they are sent across the network to you in English, but then can be translated on the fly in your browser.<br />
<br />
At one level this is just a "hack", and even Neskie viewed it as a <a href="https://github.com/neskie/secwepemc-facebook/blob/master/README.textile" target="_blank">temporary workaround</a>: "It would be good to be able to use the official Facebook Translations App, but Secwepemctsín isn’t listed. Until then, we can use this script." Personally, I think it's a bigger, more important idea than that. What it means is that any language group can undertake a translation without having to wait for Facebook's approval or permission, and the same approach works in theory for Google or other popular web sites that aren't open to translation. I've been working on open source software translations for more than ten years, and have contributed to the Irish translations of <a href="http://gaeilge.mozdev.org/" target="_blank">Mozilla Firefox</a>, <a href="http://ga.libreoffice.org/" target="_blank">LibreOffice</a>, <a href="http://l10n.kde.org/team-infos.php?teamcode=ga" target="_blank">KDE</a>, etc. I've strongly advocated [<a href="http://borel.slu.edu/pub/ili.pdf" target="_blank">PDF</a>] for an open source approach among indigenous language groups who are just starting out on software translation, because it means that the community itself can maintain control and ownership of their work, instead of having to rely on the goodwill of a big, for-profit corporation. The trouble we're facing now, however, is that more and more of the software we use is "software as a service": Gmail instead of Mozilla Thunderbird, Google Docs instead of LibreOffice, etc., or social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. This trend puts control of the online "linguistic landscape" firmly back in the hands of big corporations. Neskie's approach gives us a way to maintain a measure of control over the language we choose to use online.<br />
<br />
The response to this project has been overwhelming. More than 60 different language groups have started translations, and we already have <a href="https://github.com/kscanne/secwepemc-facebook/blob/master/INSTALL.textile" target="_blank">more than 30</a> that are in a usable state. About two-thirds of these languages are endangered according to the <a href="http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/" target="_blank">UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger</a>, and in the majority of cases, I'm aware of no previous efforts to translate software into the language.<br />
<br />
Doing a "complete" translation is quite easy. Depending on how much terminology you have to make up, it can take as little as a couple of hours of work. I've picked out around 200 of the most common messages that appear on Facebook to be translated. Of course this is only a small fraction of the entire site (which would be overwhelmingly large for a small language group to undertake), but by choosing these 200 messages carefully, we're able to achieve a convincing immersive experience in the target language with a minimum of effort.<br />
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There are a few technical terms needing translation (e.g. "Mobile Uploads", "email address", "Apps", "Cookies"), some site-specific jargon ("to like/unlike", "to poke someone", "status update"), and western concepts that have been difficult to render in some indigenous languages ("Privacy", "Advertising"). A useful technique for terminology creation is to see how other languages have dealt with a given concept. To help with this, I've asked everyone who has contributed a new Facebook translation to also provide "back translations" of some of these tricky terms into English, in the hope that some of these might be helpful to new translators. These back translations are stored <a href="https://github.com/kscanne/secwepemc-facebook/wiki/Back-Translations" target="_blank">on the project wiki</a>, and we welcome additional contributions in any language.<br />
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I should also say that you don't need to translate all 200 messages if you don't want to. For a language that is rarely, if ever, seen on the computer, I think there's great symbolic value in even a translation of just a few key words, for example "Like", "Unlike", "Comment", and "Share".<br />
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Would you like to try translating Facebook into your language? Leave a comment below and I can send you detailed instructions!Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-40918737847130925382011-12-23T15:33:00.000-08:002019-02-18T13:15:24.398-08:001000 Languages on the Web<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;">
<span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="http://cs.slu.edu/~scannell/pub/crubadan.svg" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W74L3xc18YI/TvSqM04T8UI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/Daaa8VJshHA/s400/1000.png" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cs.slu.edu/~scannell/pub/crubadan.svg" target="_blank">Click to see the full size image</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">About the Image</span><br />
<br />
Since 2003 I've been gathering texts from the web written in indigenous and minority languages. The image above is a "family tree" of the 1000 languages I've found to date, where proximity in the tree is measured by a straightforward statistical comparison of writing systems (details below).<br />
<ul>
<li>When you load the full image it will be too big to fit in a browser window and you may not see anything at first <span style="font-size: small;">–</span> you'll need to use the horizontal and vertical scrollbars to explore different parts of the tree (most browsers will let you zoom in and out also). And because it's an SVG image, you can use your browser's search functionality (probably Ctrl+F or ⌘-F) to find different language codes, although the search behavior can be a bit weird/unpredictable.</li>
<li>Each language is colored according to its linguistic family (<a href="https://github.com/kscanne/orthotree/blob/master/colors.txt" target="_blank">details here</a>). For example, all Indo-European languages are greenish colors, with different subfamilies (Celtic, Germanic, etc.) being slightly different shades of green. I also tried to use similar colors for languages from the same geographical region even when there is no known genetic relationship among them, and so Arawakan, Quechuan, Tucanoan languages (all from South America) are shades of purple, while Central and North American languages are shades of blue.</li>
<li>Clicking on a language opens a new tab or window with the documentation page for the <a href="http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp" target="_blank">ISO 639-3</a> language identifier where you'll find a name for the language in English and a link to its <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/" target="_blank">Ethnologue</a> page for additional information.</li>
<li>What I'm calling "languages" are really "writing systems"; you'll see, for example, separate nodes for <i>bo</i> (Tibetan) and <i>bo-Latn</i> (Tibetan written in Latin script). In a small number of cases I track <a href="http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp#M" target="_blank">macrolanguages</a>, regional variants (e.g. <i>en, en-IE, en-ZA</i>), and some dialects. In total, there are 919 distinct ISO 639-3 codes among the 1000 writing systems represented.</li>
</ul>
I'm using these data in collaboration with language groups all around the world to develop <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/apps.html" target="_blank">basic resources that help people use their language online</a>: keyboard input methods, spell checkers, online dictionaries, and so on. This work also underlies the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/" target="_blank">Indigenous Tweets</a> and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/" target="_blank">Indigenous Blogs</a> projects, which aim to strengthen languages through social media. You can learn more about how indigenous and minority language communities are using the web, social media, and technology to help revitalize their languages by <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/IndigenousTweet" target="_blank">following us on Twitter</a>.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The Gory Details </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Everything is based on an analysis of three character sequences ("3-grams") in the different languages. It turns out that computing the statistics of 3-grams in a given language provides a "fingerprint" that can be used for language identification and a number of other applications. Specifically, imagine the huge-dimensional vector space V whose axes are labelled with all possible 3-grams of Unicode characters </span><span style="font-size: small;">(dim V > 10<sup>15</sup>)</span><span style="font-size: small;">. Given a collection of texts in a language, you can compute the frequencies of all 3-grams that appear in the collection, defining a (sparse) vector in V "representing" the language. We then define the distance between two languages to be the angle between their representative vectors in V. This can be computed by scaling the vectors to unit length and computing their dot product (which is the cosine of the angle we want).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Once we know the distance between each pair of languages, we can reconstruct a phylogenetic tree using any of a number of well-known algorithms. The image above was created using the so-called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighbor_joining" target="_blank">"neighbor-joining" algorithm</a> (which basically builds the tree in a greedy, bottom-up way). A side-effect of the algorithm is that each edge in the tree is assigned a length, but note that the edge lengths in the rendered image have nothing to do with the computed edge lengths (indeed, it's unlikely that the tree can be rendered in a distance-preserving way in two dimensions). Another side-effect of the algorithm is that the tree is connected </span>–<span style="font-size: small;"> by definition, all languages are within a bounded distance of each other </span>– <span style="font-size: small;">and so near the root of the tree you'll see various languages which use completely different scripts joined in a more-or-less random fashion (Khmer, Georgian, Tamil, Cherokee, etc.). It would be easy enough to tweak the distance function or the algorithm to render languages with different scripts as separate connected components.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">How many languages are out there?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Ethnologue lists 6909 living languages in the world, but how many have some presence on the web? The answer depends greatly on what kinds of documents you include. If one takes linguistic studies into account, the number might be as high as 4000 – the <a href="http://www.language-archives.org/" target="_blank">Open Language Archives Community</a> (OLAC) brings together data from linguistic archives all over the world into a single, searchable interface. The <a href="http://www.language-archives.org/documents/coverage.html" target="_blank">OLAC coverage page</a> shows, at present, the existence of online resources for 3930 of the 6909 Ethnologue languages, with more material coming online every day. The amazing <a href="http://odin.linguistlist.org/" target="_blank">ODIN project</a> harvests examples of interlinear glossed text from linguistic papers, and has over 1250 languages in its database.<br />
<br />
The 1000 languages found by my web crawler are, for the most part, what you might call "primary texts": newspapers, blog posts, Wikipedia articles, Bible translations, etc. My best guess at present is that around 1500 languages have primary texts of this kind on the web. If you know of online resources written in a language that's not listed on our <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/stadas.html" target="_blank">status page</a>, please let me know in the comments.<br />
<br />
Here are a couple of closely-related (but ill-defined) questions: first, "How many of the 6909 languages have a writing system?" and second, since a great number of the texts we've found are Bible translations or other evangelical works, one might ask "How many languages have a writing system that's used regularly by members of the speaker community?" I've looked around a bit for answers to these questions but I haven't found any careful studies in the literature.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Mash it up!</span><br />
<br />
I put all of the data and scripts needed to generate the image in a <a href="https://github.com/kscanne/orthotree" target="_blank">github repository</a>. I'm not an expert on data visualization, so I'm hoping others will grab the data and experiment. One idea would be to use a more sophisticated algorithm for reconstructing the tree, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_phylogenetics#Fitch-Margoliash_method" target="_blank">Fitch-Margoliash</a>. In terms of the visualization itself, it would be cool to do something that connects the tree to locations on a world map where the languages are spoken. There are also some <a href="http://thejit.org/" target="_blank">Javascript/HTML5 graph viewers </a>that might provide a better browsing experience. Or you might simply select the colors in different ways (perhaps colors for different <a href="http://wals.info/" target="_blank">typological features</a>: for example, SVO, VSO, etc.). Feel free to post additional ideas in the comments!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Thanks</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First, I'd like to thank the hundreds of people who have contributed to the project over the years by providing training texts in many of the languages, correcting errors in the language identification, editing word lists, and helping separate different dialects/orthographies. You'll find many of their names on the <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/stadas.html" target="_blank">project status page</a>. Thanks also to Michael Cysouw who first suggested generating an image of this kind (you can find his image, created in 2005, on the <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/" target="_blank">main project page</a>). Finally, thanks to my colleagues at Twitter for several helpful conversations and for their interest in the Indigenous Tweets project.</span>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-51187078167952196202011-12-06T04:00:00.000-08:002011-12-06T04:00:13.132-08:00Language revitalization through free software: the case of Aragonese<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Aragonese is one of the minority languages of Spain, spoken in the autonomous community of Aragon in the northeastern part of the country. With an estimated 10,000 native speakers, it is in a much more precarious position than its neighbors Catalan and Basque. Nevertheless, there is a vibrant online Aragonese community that is working hard to develop free and open source resources to support and help revitalize the language. One notable example is the tremendous volunteer effort that has gone into developing the Aragonese Wikipedia; weighing in at 25,000+ articles and 2.5 million words, it is believed to be the largest Wikipedia of any language, per number of native speakers. For this interview, I spoke with two leading figures in the Aragonese online community about their work on behalf of the language: Santiago Paricio, a high
school
teacher of Spanish in Navarra, and <span lang="ES">Juan Pablo Martínez, a </span>university professor in the Engineering School at the University of Zaragoza.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVszkq6hle00tJifHKLQE6TAu13YmdQiPlCSUyb7ck1ob9UBv3wULKc7aUZZJcz2QoTDsBjJLf1WrvZk5yAmBzNp_8VUxroTjKHQa-k3Y39ZcEhh8En8DhIscBirsxu3NMrjM7-Pu9Sg/s1600/Foto0319.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVszkq6hle00tJifHKLQE6TAu13YmdQiPlCSUyb7ck1ob9UBv3wULKc7aUZZJcz2QoTDsBjJLf1WrvZk5yAmBzNp_8VUxroTjKHQa-k3Y39ZcEhh8En8DhIscBirsxu3NMrjM7-Pu9Sg/s320/Foto0319.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Santi Paricio (L) and Juan Pablo Martínez (R)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>KPS:</b></span><i><span style="font-size: small;"> Please tell us a little bit about the Aragonese language, how many speakers there are currently, whether it's taught in schools, etc.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">Although there are no official data, it is estimated that some
10,000 native
speakers in the north of Aragon (less than 1% of the Aragonese
population) plus
an indeterminate number of second-language speakers speak
Aragonese. The number
of native speakers is dramatically decreasing mainly due to the fall
of
intergenerational transmission. In most areas, only older people
use the
language. In contrast, there is a certain interest among young
and mid-age
people to learn the language in areas where the language is not
spoken anymore
as a native language. Some of them are even raising their children
in Aragonese.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But
this
has not always been like that. Aragonese was once spoken in
almost all
Aragon and was one of the administrative languages of the
Kingdom of Aragon.
However, it has suffered a constant decline and progressive
substitution by Spanish
since the 15<sup>th</sup> Century. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
language
is only being taught as a voluntary subject at five primary schools
in
the north of Aragon. Since 2010, with the passage of the “Law on
Languages of
Aragon” the language has a minimal legal recognition from the local government.
However, the Act, which established a Language Regulator Body
(Academy) and
voluntary classes in all educative levels in the regions where
the language is
still spoken, has hardly been developed, and the new local
Administration
elected in May 2011 has announced that they will reform the Act, which they
opposed, rather than develop it. According to the <a href="http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/">UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages</a>, Aragonese is categorized as “definitely endangered”.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">You can hear the sound of Aragonese at the <a href="http://www.acparola.com/aaa/?section=2">Archivo Audiovisual del Aragonés</a>.<a href="http://www.acparola.com/aaa/?section=2" target="_blank"></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">
<b>KPS:</b><i> What opportunities are there to use the language online?</i><br />
<br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">In
Aragon,
access to technology is not itself an issue. However, native
speakers
of Aragonese are a mainly aging and rural-based population, so
their access to the Internet,
computers, and ICT in general is on average lower than the rest
of the
population. Speakers of Aragonese as a second language are, in
contrast, much more
active on the Internet and, being more conscious of the language,
they tend to use
the language more often.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">There
are
not many sites or software translated into Aragonese. Some
examples are <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki">Mediawiki</a>
(the software to build wiki webpages like Wikipedia), some parts
of <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a> and
<a href="http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/"> Firefox</a>, and several other small programs.</span><span style="font-size: small;">
There is a nonprofit association, <a href="http://www.softaragones.org/">Softaragones</a>, in which
we are also involved, promoting software localization for
Aragonese. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukz93tDd7QDN1QtXCjCv2GgPbzX3YXLXTlIncgme2lZih6WdGUlga3cY3qGDmSZEL_ULdyG5lvatQzFWeecfn8AYRMwDwnlE2S60QMT5rH4OhdEliRDXLJCvbPud35Nok-7_HN9yKFg/s1600/portalada_wikipedia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukz93tDd7QDN1QtXCjCv2GgPbzX3YXLXTlIncgme2lZih6WdGUlga3cY3qGDmSZEL_ULdyG5lvatQzFWeecfn8AYRMwDwnlE2S60QMT5rH4OhdEliRDXLJCvbPud35Nok-7_HN9yKFg/s320/portalada_wikipedia.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aragonese Wikipedia</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: small;">As
for
resources, <a href="http://an.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia in Aragonese</a> is probably the main one nowadays. It is a very active project
(the most active
Wikipedia in terms of size per number of speakers), and
represents now the
widest corpus in Aragonese which can be found on the Internet
(with the
advantage of being free content). It has also acquired the
attention of
Aragonese mass media, with several interviews on the public
radio station and a
full-page story in the main newspaper. We are currently
involved in developing
open-source tools for the language: spell checkers, machine
translation
systems, online dictionaries… We can also highlight the efforts in the field of distance
language learning; for example the non-profit cultural
association
<a href="http://www.nogara-religada.org/">Nogará-Religada</a>
which launched <a href="http://www.cursosnogara.net/">distance courses in Aragonese</a> in recent years,
based on the Moodle
platform and assisted by other technologies, such as VoIP. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">However,
lack
of resources and translated software does not preclude the use
of the
language on the Internet: we can find a number of websites and
blogs written in
Aragonese, and even a recently-created <a href="http://arredol.com/">digital newspaper</a>. Although modest in absolute numbers, their relative
prevalence is
high, given the size of the Aragonese-speaking community. Social
networks
represent a good opportunity to use the language online, by
creating online speaker
communities (very important for a community that is so sparse in the
“real world”), or
just using the language for general communication purposes
(taking advantage of
the fact that intercomprehension with the majority language,
Spanish, is not
difficult).</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>KPS: </b><i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are
reluctant to use their languages online. </i></span><i> What is the general attitude toward using the language online? Are there any special obstacles that arise for Aragonese speakers?</i><b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">Most
native
speakers wouldn’t even think about using the language online,
because the
language still has a stigma of being “bad speaking”, “useless
language”, “only
valid to speak about the rural world”.</span><span style="font-size: small;">
Some don’t even feel comfortable using the language
outside their family
circle. This does not fully apply to the youngest generations
who have received
the language from their parents: they often have a better
linguistic awareness,
as a part of their identity, and are less reluctant to use the
language online,
at least when communicating with known people. However, as most
of them have
not received any education in Aragonese, nor have they ever
written the
language, they often feel insecure about it. On the contrary,
speakers of
Aragonese as a second language are more likely to use Aragonese
online, not
only as a communication tool with other Aragonese-speaking
Internet users, but
also as an activist decision to promote the language. We think
that the main
driving forces for using the language online are activism and
identity. </span></div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhngll3vtb1ZQJJWrki0emd2mA2JsxfJ0H5RP1FJQdHju2n3yrb2kuizYP7rMlqsDcMHBnZ1xkFvbsx4W_F-ZI3ub0BSGdqQlXninxi3pwSFeRwC5nCLxt4v-Nnq2SOVo_Lx43wD1rixg/s1600/TAPA+POAC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhngll3vtb1ZQJJWrki0emd2mA2JsxfJ0H5RP1FJQdHju2n3yrb2kuizYP7rMlqsDcMHBnZ1xkFvbsx4W_F-ZI3ub0BSGdqQlXninxi3pwSFeRwC5nCLxt4v-Nnq2SOVo_Lx43wD1rixg/s320/TAPA+POAC.jpg" width="208" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The proposed official orthography</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>KPS: </b><i>How is/was
computing terminology developed? Is there a "language board" or are terms developed
naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they
communicated to the community?</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">That also holds in the case of Aragonese. The community usually
adapts most
commonly used terms from Spanish or Catalan to Aragonese, but
there is not
always a unique solution.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> For
lesser-used, more specific terms, we can mention the community working on the Aragonese
Wikipedia as a source for terminology.</span><span style="font-size: small;">
Softaragones has also developed a “collection of
computing terms” and a
style guide for software localization and translation, but this
is mainly
useful for advanced users and translators, rather than for
regular users. Due to
the lack of response from the administration, the II Congress of
Aragonese
created in 2006 a nonofficial regulatory board, the “<a href="http://www.academiadelaragones.org/">Academia de l’Aragonés</a>”.
Together
with their proposal of an interdialectal spelling</span><span style="font-size: small;"> system (<a href="http://www.academiadelaragones.org/biblio/EDACAR7_2.pdf">PDF</a>), they published some guidelines on the adaptation of technical
words, which has
somewhat reduced the multiplicity of possible solutions.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> In brief, development of
computing
terminology is needed in Aragonese, but does not preclude online
use of the
language.</span></div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>KPS: </b><i>Are
there other special challenges your community faces in terms
of developing technology for the language and/or communicating
online?</i><br />
<br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;">
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">We
believe
the adoption of a unique spelling system would be crucial to
booster
the generation of new resources. The 2010 proposal of the Academia de
l’Aragonés linked above has not reached full consensus, but it is the spelling system
most widely used
in the generation of new online content (e.g., in the Aragonese
Wikipedia and in the online newspaper Arredol), as well
as among most active online users (as an example of this, it is
used by 25 of
the 26 top tweeters listed on the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/an/">Indigenous Tweets Aragonese page</a>).
As
a consequence of this, the open source linguistic tools now
under
development are using this spelling system.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Another issue is that of dialectal variation.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> While there is no
communication problem
caused by dialectal differences, it is necessary to provide them
with tools as
spellcheckers and/or translators (or at least take them into
account, as there
is not a strong standard dialect). In general, dialects are not represented
enough online.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBC7xKF-a35_DwSUl2AXsOkVwnJdShsmtS78TjA7mZ2kk7XyEDKpCdAkd87-ABW6knQqUpqPzGxZVc7dVgzMxwzjJ_kJDwqrAepi7wp5qT42Jcd7VtjK9VQ4lPeNS0IDvjf5OpDwyXw/s1600/WTF_Sendero_Bota%25CC%2581nico.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBC7xKF-a35_DwSUl2AXsOkVwnJdShsmtS78TjA7mZ2kk7XyEDKpCdAkd87-ABW6knQqUpqPzGxZVc7dVgzMxwzjJ_kJDwqrAepi7wp5qT42Jcd7VtjK9VQ4lPeNS0IDvjf5OpDwyXw/s320/WTF_Sendero_Bota%25CC%2581nico.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bilingual signs on a hiking trail (<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WTF_Sendero_Bot%C3%A1nico.jpg">CC-BY</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Of
course
being such a small minority, software vendors and service providers do
not show interest in including localizations for Aragonese, to say nothing of
developing linguistic resources. We must find the way forward
for our language
in open source/free software projects, which allow the reuse
or adaptation of
technologies and resources developed for other languages. An
example of this is
<a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/">Apertium</a>, a free/open source machine translation project which has just
released a first version of an Aragonese-Spanish bidirectional
translator (the latest version can be tested <a href="http://translator.prompsit.com/en/">here</a> or <a href="http://www.opentrad.com/en/inicio">here</a>).
These projects also promote cooperation between developers
interested in
different lesser-used languages or language lovers in general. </span>Another example is the release of an Aragonese spell checker, which already has extensions for <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/corrector-ortografico-aragones/">Mozilla products</a> and <a href="http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/corrector-ortografico-aragones">LibreOffice</a>.</div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />
KPS: </b><i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think
social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are helping encourage
language use by younger speakers?</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">Yes,
mostly
young people use the language online. Until a couple of years
ago, the
use of the language online was mostly limited to some
second-language speakers
and activists.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Recently,
social networks like Facebook and Twitter have opened new chances to use the
language, to connect
with other speakers, and are seen as a window to show the
language and the
community. This has indeed encouraged the use of Aragonese by
younger speakers,
now including native speakers, who have shifted their oral
communication habits
to these new modalities.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> This
is very
good, as it puts people speaking different dialects in contact with each other,
and also native
speakers with second-language speakers, improving the feeling of being a
community.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />
</b></span></div>
<div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>KPS: </b><i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both
in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Village_d%27anso.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Village_d%27anso.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aragonese-speaking village of Ansó (<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Village_d%27anso.jpg">CC-BY-SA</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>SP/JPM:</b> <span style="font-size: small;">It is difficult to say. </span><span style="font-size: small;"> The dream
scenario would be that children in the speaking areas would be
able to learn
the language at school, and children in the rest of Aragon would
have the
opportunity to learn it. Aragonese society should also be more
aware of the
cultural value of their own language. With support from the
Administration and
Civil Society, the objective of preserving intergenerational
transmission and
increasing language vitality could be achieved. </span><span style="font-size: small;"> In terms of online use, the
aim would be that
Aragonese speakers find the tools and resources to use their
language online
(translators, spellcheckers, speech synthesis and recognition,
localized
applications…), to get and create content in their language,
and to use it
correctly.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">In
more
realistic terms, we believe that the use of the language online
and the
availability of online/computer language resources will indeed
increase in the coming years, and this will open opportunities for the language,
but this by
itself does not guarantee the survival of Aragonese.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> The language must be
transmitted to the
children, and they need to learn to read and write the language
at school.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Otherwise,
the efforts we are undertaking in
the “digital world” might be useless.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> On
the positive side, while decades ago it was already thought to
be very close to
extinction, Aragonese is still a living language in
the 21<sup>st</sup>
century, and we are working to keep it alive.</span></div>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-81255716496098641262011-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:002011-11-11T06:40:56.061-08:00"Murdered on its native territory": Jordan Kutzik on Yiddish<i>Yiddish is a Germanic language tradtionally spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and in diaspora communities around the world. Prior to World War II, it was the mother tongue of more than 10 million people, and had a thriving written tradition, with newspapers, scholarly works, and a modern literature being produced in the language. This came to an abrupt halt with the Holocaust, which left the vast majority of Yiddish speakers dead, and saw the survivors scattered to all corners of the globe. Although the language remains relatively strong among certain Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities, outside of those communities it faces many of the same obstacles as other minority languages in terms of encouraging its use among the younger generation, and guaranteeing intergenerational transmission.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Jordan Kutzik just finished his BA at Rutgers University in Jewish Studies and Spanish, focusing in particular on the Yiddish language and Spanish translation. He is currently working at the <a href="http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/%20">National Yiddish Book Center</a> in Amherst, Massachusetts as a fellow.</i><br />
<br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>For readers not familiar with your language, tell us a bit about the history of Yiddish and its current status.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jordan Kutzik</td></tr>
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<b>JK:</b> The history of Yiddish and its current status is much more complicated than any other indigenous or minority language except for perhaps Romani, because the language was murdered on its native territory and exists today in different pockets of speaker communities descended from immigrants from Eastern Europe on four different continents and the language’s “strength” or “health” varies by community, country, and of course how one decides to measure it.<br />
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Yiddish, a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet, was the mother-tongue of around 11 million people, 8 million of them in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust (Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Moldova, etc,) with immigrant communities around the world. In its Eastern European heartland it was the language of Jews of all levels of religious affiliations and the language of various schooling systems from secular schools to traditional religious academies. Yiddish had an important literature of religious materials and original secular literature as well as translations from other languages and more than 100 daily newspapers, some of which were of a very high quality, on par with the national newspapers in other languages of the time period. The common language throughout Eastern Europe promoted a common ethnic identity among Ashkenazi Jews (those who traced their ancestry to Germany) and Yiddish was the strongest non-territorial language in the world, especially in terms of written material. Right as the language was coming into its own in a modern sense, the Holocaust left around 6 million Jews dead in Europe, including 5.5 million Yiddish speakers. The genocide not only killed its speakers, but more devastatingly for Yiddish it all but destroyed the civilization in which it had been the natural language. Although by my own estimates around 1.25 million Yiddish speakers survived the war (most fleeing deep into the USSR, some surviving concentration camps, in Partisan Units, blending in with the surrounding population, joining the Russian army, etc.), the communities and institutions in which the language lived did not, and the vast majority of survivors left Eastern Europe for the Americas or British Mandate Palestine and later Israel.<br />
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In America the language died out in immigrant Jewish communities just as most immigrant languages eventually die out and in Israel the language was strongly discouraged and in some spheres actually outlawed in favor of Hebrew so it was not passed on for more than one generation for the most part there either. After World War II, the USSR gained the Baltics and Poland and the strength of Yiddish among those few Jews who remained declined even further as the USSR enacted strong anti-Jewish national programs in Poland and the Ukraine and to a lesser extent Lithuania. Yiddish did survive, however, among Hungarian Hasidim (who despite the name came not just from Hungary but also parts of Romania and Poland) for whom it largely remains the lingua franca whether these communities are in New York, Israel, Belgium, England, Canada or Australia. In these communities Yiddish is the language of schools and religious academies, some media (newspapers, magazines, radio shows done through telephone hotlines, etc.) and the home. In New York there are around 100,000 Hasidic Yiddish speakers and the population is extremely young and growing rapidly as the average family has 7 or 8 children. There are about the same number of Yiddish speakers among Orthodox Jews in Israel as well, although the number there is tougher to gauge as language of the home is not asked as part of the census. There are perhaps 20,000 Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jews in Antwerp, and perhaps a similar figure in both Montréal and London. So a figure of 250,000 Hasidic Yiddish-speaking Jews is a fair guesstimate and the language is healthiest among these communities, being spoken by people of all ages.<br />
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Outside of the Hasidic world, Yiddish survived as the lingua-franca of many Holocaust survivors and many of their children speak it too. There are still probably around 200,000 Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors, with the majority in the USA and Israel. But this population is very elderly and unfortunately will be gone in the coming decades. Additionally, the language never died out entirely as a language of culture in Jewish communities in America, Latin America, Australia, France and Israel, and there are still non-Hasidic Yiddish language publications around the world. There are, however, very few families who have kept the language alive as the language of the home and of raising children outside of the Hasidic world. My generation has seen a bit of a revival as I know several hundred young people (age 16-30) like myself who have learned the language to fluency and I know a few dozen families who are raising their children as Yiddish speakers even though it was the mother-tongue of neither parent. This is something I particularly hope to see more of in the coming years. There are Yiddish courses in several dozen universities around the world, and some non-Hasidic Jewish day-schools teach Yiddish, although only a few do it so that the children leave with any real fluency. Among non-Hasidic Jewish schools Yiddish is strongest today in Australia. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In Lithuania with Fania Brantsovsky<span style="color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
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As far as official status; Yiddish has official status in the Jewish autonomous region of Russia known as Birobizhan (near Korea!), but there are very few Jews there and few of them speak Yiddish. Many non-Jews there learn Yiddish in the schools, however, some extremely well, and there are even government signs on courthouses and such in Yiddish, the only place in the world with actual Yiddish signage on public buildings. Yiddish has token recognition in Israel, along with Ladino, the language of Jews who left Spain after the expulsion of 1492, but for all intents and purposes the Israeli government doesn’t do much to support Yiddish. Yiddish is also an official minority language of Sweden, Holland, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine under the <a href="http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang/default_en.asp">European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages</a> but not much is done on its behalf by these governments. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>How have you been personally involved with language revitalization and activism on behalf of Yiddish?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> I have been involved with Yiddish language revitalization/activism for the past four years in various capacities. I am a <a href="http://yugntruf.org/about-us/who-we-are/?lang=en#jordan">board member</a> of <a href="http://yugntruf.org/">Yugntruf Youth for Yiddish</a>, an organization which promotes Yiddish among young people around the world and most especially in the NYC area. Almost all of our events are run exclusively in Yiddish, most prominently our “Yiddish Week” which attracts around 150 people from around the world. I am particularly active with Yugntruf’s facebook and twitter presence, as well as finding young Yiddish speakers in unexpected places around the world through the internet. I also run a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/ikhveysnit">Yiddish-themed Youtube channel</a> with lots of films of tours in Yiddish with English subtitles with Fania Brantsovsky, the librarian of the <a href="http://www.judaicvilnius.com/en">Vilnius Yiddish Institute</a> and a Holocaust survivor and former partisan. I didn’t know how to make/edit films when I made the channel so most of the films aren’t of the highest quality but there is a lot of interesting and important stuff there about Yiddish, the Holocaust, Jewish culture, etc. Now that I’ve learned how to shoot/edit film properly I will have higher quality films in the future. I also work as both a freelance (paid) translator as well as a volunteer translator for people using Yiddish language source materials for research involving the Holocaust for creative writing projects, historical research etc. I copyedit an online web-journal connected with the <a href="http://yiddishfarm.org/">Yiddish Farm project</a> and have a <a href="http://thrownpeasyiddish.blogspot.com/">blog in Yiddish</a> that desperately needs to be updated. I also tweet in Yiddish on my personal Twitter feed and run a Twitter feed dedicated to publicizing Yiddish classes and immersion opportunities (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/yiddishclasses">@yiddishclasses</a>). <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What opportunities are there to use the language online? Are there websites translated into your language? What about software and other resources like web browsers, office software, spell checkers?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> Most Yiddish online now is computer generated as <a href="http://translate.google.com/">Google translate</a> is available in Yiddish. It is quite poor, actually, because if you translate a text with a word in plural form it won’t actually translate it but rather transliterate it into the Hebrew alphabet. But when you search for a Yiddish word now most of the websites that come up are Google translations of other sites that are computer generated, which makes it more difficult to find websites that were actually written in Yiddish. Among non-Google translated websites in Yiddish there are some Yiddish language publications, some Yiddish organizations, some Hasidic message-boards, a few Yiddish bands and so forth with Yiddish websites. Almost all of these sites are also in a national language like English, Hebrew, French or Polish and usually the Yiddish site itself is far less extensive than the versions in other languages. It is particularly strange and frustrating to me that none of the websites for Holocaust survivors run in Yiddish. There is also a <a href="http://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%98_%D7%96%D7%99%D7%99%D7%98">Yiddish Wikipedia</a> with some 7,000 articles (largely written by two very dedicated men), a <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=yi">Yiddish version of Google search</a>, and some Jewish communal organizations, especially in Eastern Europe, have summary pages in Yiddish. There is also an excellent <a href="http://yiddishdictionaryonline.com/">online dictionary</a> created by <a href="http://www.cs.uky.edu/%7Eraphael/">Refoyl Finkel</a>.<span style="color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></span><br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online, for various reasons. How do speakers of your language feel about using the language online?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> With the internet and Yiddish there are three distinct communities; Hasidic, Yiddishist and heritage. Hasidic Jews are, generally speaking, not supposed to be on the internet according to the rules of their own communities or are only supposed to use the internet for business in which case they will probably be doing so in a national language. Many are, however, and there is a lot of informal Yiddish language internet use among them on message boards, twitter, facebook etc. Most Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews on the internet, however, use English, Hebrew, French or Dutch as these languages are more widely understood so Yiddish usage is usually restricted to intra-community affairs, especially when they want to keep non-Hasidic Jews out. <br />
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A few Yiddishists like myself have set up Yiddish blogs, twitters, facebook pages and so forth in an effort to make the language more visible. We also have Yiddish language Google groups and so forth. Often times we use Yiddish as a matter of principle online even though we could be communicating in another language. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikcOZ3YABJmrZuUoqoq7riGJI4Jv_fMCbxlL4zj3cvuRdUQwvYKphDv9t2hhYLi8PNu0_vXfu5HKAovaK73rQ6suK-XFFx9qr_jRQ__enLe5l72tdQxaRIa6PYCXzg1XCdeTDOuWzNeRg/s400/entrance+yiddish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikcOZ3YABJmrZuUoqoq7riGJI4Jv_fMCbxlL4zj3cvuRdUQwvYKphDv9t2hhYLi8PNu0_vXfu5HKAovaK73rQ6suK-XFFx9qr_jRQ__enLe5l72tdQxaRIa6PYCXzg1XCdeTDOuWzNeRg/s320/entrance+yiddish.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trilingual sign (English/Spanish/Yiddish) in Brooklyn, NY</td></tr>
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Some heritage Yiddish speakers, often the children of Holocaust survivors, will use Yiddish if they find that they don’t have another language in common with another person. This sometimes overlaps with the Yiddishist community as well. For instance I’ve written people at Jewish communal organizations in France and Brazil about things that had nothing to do with Yiddish just to get a response that they didn’t speak English and asking if I spoke Hebrew or Yiddish! Far more people, and probably far more French Jews for that matter, speak English than Yiddish, but in some cases my knowledge of Yiddish proved to make communication possible where it wouldn’t have been otherwise. So there is some non-ideologically based internet Yiddish use going on too. I never run into that type of thing when I email a Jew in say, England or Mexico because I speak/write English and Spanish but with Brazil and France it happens occasionally. So in that sense the internet has actually gotten people to use the language more often than they would have otherwise because people are meeting online who would not meet otherwise and would otherwise have no practical use for the language. <br />
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Actually using Yiddish, however, poses some technical challenges. Yiddish uses a modified form of the Hebrew alphabet and makes use of some vowel markings and diacritical markings that are not used in Hebrew. Many people don’t know how to use the Hebrew keyboard or the Yiddish keyboard programs that have been developed and most people who can write Hebrew can’t write the special characters used for Yiddish with their Hebrew word-processing programs. Furthermore, many online programs have problems displaying right to left languages like Yiddish and have particular difficulties displaying Yiddish so things like periods, commas, and exclamation points will end up on the wrong side of a line. On Twitter the vowel markings get counted as an extra character and to make matters worse they often do not display correctly!!! A friend of mine who is very good with computers tried to make a “twitter friendly” Yiddish program with pre-combined characters but twitter still split the characters up. This makes it much easier to leave out the vowel markings and diacritical marks on Twitter but some sticklers would rather tweet shorter messages or not tweet in Yiddish at all than tweet without using the proper Yiddish spelling. Most Hasidic Jews, as well as myself sometimes, forgo the vowel markings and diacritical markings on the internet and especially on Twitter because it really can be a headache. I use a transliteration machine to type Yiddish so I can’t write Yiddish in a chat program like Facebook message so I’ll transliterate the language into the Latin alphabet. I do the same thing with text messages in Yiddish. <br />
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A bunch of us tried to organize a massive effort to translate Facebook into Yiddish since they were using crowd-source translations but it just didn’t take off. There is a Yiddish translation for Blackberry and a few smartphones have been made for Hasidic Jews in Israel in Yiddish. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>I mentioned above that many indigenous languages lack computing terminology. Is this an issue for your language? How is/was terminology developed?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> As far as vocabulary, most Yiddish speakers learned to use a computer in another language but since Yiddish is sometimes the only common language among people using it online there has been a slight tendency toward the creation of neologisms. Most of these are unknown among Hasidic Yiddish speakers and are only used by Yiddishists but a dozen or so including some of the most essential like blitspost (“email” as a category) blitsbriv (an individual email), vebzaytl (website), shleptop (laptop) have caught on in both the Hasidic and Yiddishist world. Blits means lightening in Yiddish, so the words for email mean “lightening mail” or “lightening letter.” Veb means “web” and zaytl means “page” so that renders “webpage” but it also echoes the English “website” as the pronunciation is similar. Older Yiddish words like the words for screen, document, keyboard, erase, save, etc have been naturally given newer meanings but you’ll also see English or Hebrew equivalents being used and transliterated to Yiddish spellings too. For basic everyday computer usage it’s never a problem and there are basic computer classes in Yiddish for Yiddish speaking Hasidic Jews taught over the internet but I doubt anyone is doing complicated programming in Yiddish on a regular basis, with the exception of some database work cataloging literature which was done at an Israeli University. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> There is an academic standard written Yiddish spelling but most speakers don’t use it. This really doesn’t cause any problems in computer usage or reading the language because everyone except students just beginning to read/write is familiar with variations in spelling. This does cause problems, however, when someone wants to make searchable databases.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i><br />
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<b>JK:</b> Yiddish speakers need to organize to use resources and funding available from governments, especially in Europe, to teach Yiddish to more people, especially children. I am particularly interested in the language-nest model and want to assemble a team of people down the road who could start an international non-profit to run a steering committee to run language nests in Jewish communities where Yiddish was spoken before World War II and where it enjoys protection under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. There is also enormous potential for broadcast media in Yiddish done through the internet. We have radio shows which double as podcasts and Youtube channels but we could really use something like a weekly TV show done as a podcast. There is no local market that would justify the expense of a Yiddish TV show on TV as the Orthodox don’t use TV’s but now with the internet and archiving it could be done. And I think that any use of media; whether websites like Twitter, radio broadcasts, podcasts and more traditional media like newspapers and magazines help to promote the language. <br />
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As far as online use, I’d like to see more Jewish organizations and governments, especially those that serve Yiddish speakers such as Holocaust survivors or Hasidic communities, have websites in Yiddish. It’s absurd that the government of Sweden and the New York Health Department publish information online in Yiddish but the government of Israel does not. German, French and American websites written for Holocaust survivors and their children should also have information available in Yiddish. I’d also like to see a usable Facebook interface in Yiddish. Obviously Facebook in Yiddish wouldn’t be practically useful like say a Health Department bulletin written for Hasidic Jews but it would be a really cool thing to be able to show to young people and say “hey, you can even use Facebook in Yiddish!”Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-74868846598516569522011-09-18T22:06:00.000-07:002011-09-18T22:07:56.388-07:00New feature: Indigenous Blogs!The Indigenous Tweets project turned six months old on Saturday, coincidentally the same day we reached <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/IndigenousTweet/followers">1000 followers on Twitter</a>. To celebrate these milestones, I've added an exciting new feature to the site that tracks <i>blogs</i> written in 50 indigenous and minority languages. You can find this new feature at <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/">http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/</a> (I also registered <a href="http://indigenousblogs.com/">http://indigenousblogs.com/</a> but it should just redirect you to the other address).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxuND6rO-O8IiPVLjW0UwvJOniUG-b7p3lljMVRy5ymg6CRz7OSQONbqohPO5F8MChXf_bHtlp0lMcdB0jA4Q65BnhtDlAnAdFnhIVBNd-lcxIOH3-y2l96EoeGw2Zkq8WWUy3W-Tdw/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-18+at+11.58.08+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxuND6rO-O8IiPVLjW0UwvJOniUG-b7p3lljMVRy5ymg6CRz7OSQONbqohPO5F8MChXf_bHtlp0lMcdB0jA4Q65BnhtDlAnAdFnhIVBNd-lcxIOH3-y2l96EoeGw2Zkq8WWUy3W-Tdw/s320/Screen+shot+2011-09-18+at+11.58.08+PM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Indigenous Blogs: Main Page</td></tr>
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For now, I'm only tracking blogs hosted at <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogspot</a>, which hosts more than 90% of the blogs written in the languages I'm interested in. That said, I hope to add other popular services like <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a>, <a href="http://tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>, <a href="http://www.movabletype.com/">MovableType</a>, etc. going forward. <br />
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The site is laid out just like Indigenous Tweets: there is a <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/">main page</a> with a table of the supported languages, and then if you click on a language in the table you'll be taken to a new page that shows all of the blogs in the language along with some statistics for each: number of posts, percentage of posts in the language, total number of words, date and title of last post. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFWdIfIESC0R3aHtB0DR9VoaRZjatAFLd-K5hUbchB5D976K3u7cANGPBzQ3YLjfIPdKnX-VJsyRRFQfaJluYsezVi5rHIADnStWC1tD1XnTpZCiDsc6jDpkHNFNBNZ-TeIMkdysrCmQ/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-19+at+12.01.55+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFWdIfIESC0R3aHtB0DR9VoaRZjatAFLd-K5hUbchB5D976K3u7cANGPBzQ3YLjfIPdKnX-VJsyRRFQfaJluYsezVi5rHIADnStWC1tD1XnTpZCiDsc6jDpkHNFNBNZ-TeIMkdysrCmQ/s320/Screen+shot+2011-09-19+at+12.01.55+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Indigenous Blogs language page: Irish/Gaeilge</td></tr>
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What I hope will be most useful are the <i>feeds</i> that I've provided on each language page; these will contain every post in every blog written in the language. You'll see a link to the feed on the right-hand side of the page, with the text "Subscribe to all posts in this language:
<a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/feeds/qu.xml" type="application/atom+xml"><img src="http://indigenoustweets.com/resources/feed-icon-14x14.png" /></a>". With most browsers, you can subscribe to the feed just by clicking on this icon (if you've never used a news feed before, here is a <a href="http://www.whatisrss.com/">useful introduction</a>). I subscribe to feeds using <a href="http://www.google.com/reader">Google Reader</a>, but there are many other popular readers like <a href="http://www.netvibes.com/">NetVibes</a>, <a href="http://netnewswireapp.com/">NetNewsWire</a>, <a href="http://my.yahoo.com/">My Yahoo!</a>, and <a href="http://www.rssowl.org/">RSSOwl</a>.<br />
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If you'd like to be more selective about what you read, you can pick any blog that looks good to you, click on it in the table to visit the blog itself, and subscribe from there. Most Blogspot blogs have a link that says something like "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)", usually at the bottom of the page.<br />
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If you know of a Blogspot blog that is missing from one of the tables, simply enter it into the form on the right-hand side of the page. It should appear in the table within 24 hours.<br />
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Finally, like the Indigenous Tweets site, I've designed things to make it easy to translate the individual language pages. The Indigenous Blogs pages for Aragonese, Aymara, Welsh, Frisian, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Haitian Creole,<span style="font-size: small;"> Māori, Chicheŵa, and Yiddish are already translated; great thanks to Juan Pablo Martínez Cortés, Ruben Hilaire, Carl Morris, Rhys Wynne, Wim Benes, Michael Bauer, Jean Came Poulard, Karaitiana Taiuru, Edmond Kachale, and Jordan Kutzik for providing these translations. There are just seven short messages to translate (in addition to the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-languages.html">13 needed for the Indigenous Tweets translation</a>):</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Title</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Author</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Posts</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Last Post</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Words</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Any blogs missing?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">Subscribe to all posts in this language</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;">I hope you all enjoy this new feature, and I hope it inspires some of you to start a blog in your own language! </span>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-69393837480785469032011-09-07T07:41:00.000-07:002011-09-09T06:55:11.011-07:00In the shadow of Pinatubo: José Navarro on Kapampangan<i>Kapampangan is spoken in Central Luzon, on the main Philippine island of Luzon, north of Manila (see map below). It is the seventh largest language of the Philippines, with about 2.5 million native speakers. According to the Philippine Constitution, regional languages have "auxiliary official" status in the regions, but, despite being the main language of Pampanga Province and one of the two main languages of Tarlac Province, Kapampangan does not have official status, and is not taught in schools.</i><br />
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<i>According to the 1987 Constitution, the official languages of the Philippines are English and Filipino. Filipino was originally conceived of as a national language that would be "developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages", but in practice this has not happened; nowadays it is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_language">usually described</a> as a "standardized form" or a "prestige register" of the Tagalog language (Tagalog is the most widely spoken indigenous language on the islands and the traditional language of the capital city, Manila). Many speakers of regional languages in the Philippines view Filipino and Tagalog as one and the same. It appears that Google does as well; the Google search interface was available as far back as 2000 in "Tagalog", but if you browse the <a href="http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040201215358*/http://www.google.com/language_tools">Internet Archive</a>, you'll find that sometime in 2004 it was renamed "Filipino".</i><br />
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<i>In any case, the promotion of Filipino has taken its toll on the use of Kapampangan and the other indigenous languages of the Philippines. If you look at the Indigenous Tweets pages for Philippine languages like <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ilo/">Ilocano</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/war/">Waray-Waray</a>, or <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/pam/">Kapampangan</a>, you'll notice that the percentage of tweets "in language" is on average quite low, reflecting the fact that many speakers of these languages are more accustomed to using Tagalog or English online.</i><br />
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<i>This linguistic landscape is in some ways similar to the ones found in multilingual African countries like Malawi, Tanzania, or Ghana, where one indigenous language is promoted as a national language and is taught in schools alongside English, while smaller indigenous languages are used primarily at home and in local communities. Comparisons can also be made with other multilingual states, such as Spain, Switzerland, Canada, etc., each offering a different model of regional and linguistic autonomy.</i><br />
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<i>José Navarro is a writer, editor, and researcher who has written a number of articles on language revival, focusing particularly on Kapampangan, for online discussion groups, local publications, and Wikipedia. He agreed to talk with us about the current state of the language, both online and offline.</i><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Kapampangan-speaking_regions.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Kapampangan-speaking_regions.png" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map by <a class="mw-userlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Sundita" title="User:Christopher Sundita">Christopher Sundita</a>, CC-BY-SA</td></tr>
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What opportunities are there to use Kapampangan online? Is internet connectivity or access to computers an issue for your community?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> Online, Kapampangan is used on several Kapampangan-language discussion groups, whether connected with Pampanga, Tarlac or towns or cities in these provinces, or with websites or discussion groups catering in general to Kapampangan speakers. Often, in general Philippine sites, where there are many Kapampangan speakers, the language is often used. With respect to Internet connectivity, there is connectivity in major towns and cities, although availability is still limited in small towns and rural areas. Unfortunately, software and other resources such as web browsers, office software, and online dictionaries are still generally nonexistent.<br />
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Google, the search engine, is unavailable for Kapampangan, but the Tagalog version has been made the default engine for the Philippines, reinforcing among Kapampangans contempt or a low regard for their native language, and at the same time magnifying their admiration for Tagalog, an attitude which has been encouraged by government and the schools ever since the late American regime and the Japanese Occupation, when it was first enforced in the schools.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online, for a number of reasons. What is the general attitude toward using Kapampangan online?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> Sometimes, the lack of a standard, generally accepted orthography is a problem, since the older generation used a Spanish-based spelling, while young people today, who were educated in Tagalog, are more comfortable with a Tagalog-based script. However, this is often not a problem, and if they decide to use Kapampangan, they use the orthography with which they are most comfortable. In discussion groups, however, where the audience is general Philippine rather than specifically Kapampangan, they would opt to use a more widely used language, such as English or Tagalog, since they would be ashamed to use their language when non-Kapampangans are present, something which also happens in real life (that is, not online). Sometimes, these non-Kapampangans are unusually assertive in forcing their language even in the Kapampangan sites. For instance, in a Kapampangan-language discussion group (in which Kapampangan was the usual medium), there was a Tagalog who, because he was unable to speak Kapampangan, asked a question in Tagalog. When he was requested to speak to the group in English instead, he said that in mixed company, he expected Kapampangans to use Tagalog. Unfortunately, this is applied more forcefully in some discussion groups. I've encountered groups where Tagalog and/or English are enforced, in effect discriminating against non-speakers of English or Tagalog or against non-Tagalogs.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>You've been actively involved with the <a href="http://pam.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun_Bulung">Kapampangan Wikipedia</a>. Can you comment on the importance of that work, both in terms of its usefulness as a source of native language information for Kapampangans and in terms of raising the profile of the language online?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> As you know, Wikipedia has become the most popular encyclopedia in the age of the Internet, one whose reach has truly become prodigious. It has become everybody's encyclopedia, one of the ten most visited sites on the Net. There's no question that it has gone a long way in raising the profile of the language online, and especially among young Kapampangans in general. This is very important, because the advent of the Internet has intensified overt or covert suppression of Kapampangan and the domination of Tagalog, the basis of the national language, and the only language, besides English, taught in Philippine schools. Google, as well as the major social networking or blogging media and online translators have made Tagalog their default language, making Kapampangans look down on their own language more strongly than before. This neo-colonial setup has worsened over the years, with Tagalog tending to monopolize mass media<br />
and the schools, and this now extends to the Internet.<br />
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The existence of a Kapampangan Wikipedia has a valuable role in countering this. In addition, the proposed use of the mother tongue, at least for beginning schooling, in the early grades (after decades of using exclusively Tagalog and English) will also provide a readily available reference in the language, which students can easily consult. It will also help standardize the spelling and equivalents of English terms, things which were previously available only in Tagalog.
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Betis,_Guagua,_Pampanga_%28619364538%29.jpg/720px-Betis,_Guagua,_Pampanga_%28619364538%29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Betis,_Guagua,_Pampanga_%28619364538%29.jpg/720px-Betis,_Guagua,_Pampanga_%28619364538%29.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Church in Pampanga; photo by <a class="external text" href="http://www.flickr.com/people/20119750@N00" rel="nofollow">Shubert Ciencia</a> (CC-BY)</td></tr>
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>I mentioned above that many indigenous languages lack computing terminology. Is this an issue for your language? How is/was terminology developed? Is there a "language board" or are terms developed naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they communicated to the community?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> This is usually not regarded as a problem. English terms are usually borrowed where a Kapampangan term is unavailable. Unfortunately, there is no official language board. In effect, the closest thing to this would be online discussion groups, or the Kapampangan Wikipedia. For the most part, few Kapampangan terms have been developed. Examples include "Aptas" for "Internet" and "ikuldas" for "download."<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> One problem is the lack of a standard, generally-accepted orthography or spelling system, which I have mentioned. However, I do not see this as a problem in the long term, since young people, who form the bulk of the online Kapampangan community, are converging on an orthography similar to Tagalog, which is also the one supported by the government, which may use it if the plan to use Kapampangan in schools is implemented. A more serious setback is the lack of interest from the dominant software vendors or players. Google, in particular (and now Facebook and Blogspot) has shown a bias for Tagalog in the Philippines, making Tagalog the default medium in the country, even if Tagalog computer terminology is not uniform or standard, and hence would be more difficult to understand than English, above all by non-Tagalogs. This Google bias is even more galling if one considers the fact that two non-Tagalog languages, the second and third biggest in the Philippines, Cebuano and Ilocano, have submitted interfaces for their languages to Google, which has, as far as I know, ignored them completely, not even bothering to send an acknowledgement. If bigger languages have met this kind of response, I can easily imagine the response Kapampangan would get.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> Young people do use the language online, including on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. I would hope these sites encourage the language, but the existence of the medium alone does not assure that. I've been constantly monitoring Kapampangan tweets, and have come across encouraging ones, like the following (with English translations):<br />
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"Hannggang eni byasa ku pa din mag capampangan. Kung capampangan ya ing casabi mu mag capampangan bang masanting. Mag praktis ku para e mawala" [Even now, I can still speak Kapampangan. Whenever I speak with people who are Kapampangans, I use the language, so it's better/more advantageous. I keep practicing the language so that I do not forget it.]<br />
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"kasanting byasa ka pa mu rin kapampangan :)" [It's good to know that you can still speak Kapampangan.]<br />
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I would like to think that Indigenous Tweets, and particularly Kapampangan Indigenous Tweets, has something to do with this increased pride in the language, which can help bring about a renewed revival. This is of course a continuing process... but the fact that the members of the Kapampangan Indigenous Tweets are growing is also something to celebrate.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>How is the government's support of Tagalog impacting the use of Kapampangan and other Philippine languages, online and offline?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> There is, unfortunately, a language shift to Tagalog among younger people, which is accelerating due to the exclusive use of Tagalog by government (the only Philippine language taught and encouraged by Philippine authorities), and the domination of this tongue in the media. Even worse, the use of Kapampangan is, in many cases, prohibited by schools, which instead force them to use Tagalog (or English), on pain of a fine. Placed on top of the dominance of Tagalog in the media and the increasing social pressure to move towards this more prestigious language, the effect on the native tongue is truly devastating, indeed, and is proving to be fatal in more and more places. Something has to be done to arrest this destructive attitude, and it will have to involve changing government policy and offering the language in the schools. There has to be an energetic effort to promote the language, but unfortunately, Google, Facebook, Blogspot, and the rest are helping the government push Kapampangan and other oppressed languages further toward the brink, and at a much more rapid rate. Something should be done by concerned technical (and, one hopes, influential) people in a position to do something to oppose [this].<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdyZRhm7sr4XpWVHGKW1GgnA1LMrVMAAxWuMnkJwvnAQMpG5BtRtvoCtSRP4fFq-0tRjJbMcevfQ_0N4XnYWUaPUtgAWk6967MRpzEQsOn_9lkCYde12KX6uYMmT1Tsz5EvPegwDmyw/s1600/568px-Pinatubo91eruption_clark_air_base.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdyZRhm7sr4XpWVHGKW1GgnA1LMrVMAAxWuMnkJwvnAQMpG5BtRtvoCtSRP4fFq-0tRjJbMcevfQ_0N4XnYWUaPUtgAWk6967MRpzEQsOn_9lkCYde12KX6uYMmT1Tsz5EvPegwDmyw/s320/568px-Pinatubo91eruption_clark_air_base.jpg" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mt. Pinatubo in 1991</td></tr>
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>The Kapampangan people were particularly hard hit by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo">eruption of Mt. Pinatubo</a> in 1991. Was there a direct impact in terms of language shift because of the eruption?</i><br />
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<b>JCN:</b> Yes, in many ways, and on several levels. For one, people did move away from the area affected by the eruption. For example, I know of people who moved from Bacolor (a town nearly buried by lahar or "mudflows" (actually more similar to sand - the word originated in Javanese, and has entered scientific usage) whe ended up in Cavite (south of Manila). This was repeated for thousands of people. Many of them ended in up in Mindanao, the southern island of the Philippines. Needless to say, their children ended up speaking not Kapampangan but Tagalog, or the languages of the areas to which they transferred.<br />
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For many who remained, the weakened state of the language aggravated the on-going shift to Tagalog, which began with the increasing use of Tagalog in schools, the media and society both as an inter-ethnic medium and as a language of instruction and formal discourse.
On the other hand, among many Kapampangans, there was something of a backlash, with a good number reasserting their culture and identity in response to the eruption. The aftermath of the catastrophe led to the revival of Kapampangan festivals and culture in general, of Kapampangan publications, and of government support. One of the important things which happened was the founding of the Center for Kapampangan Studies by a leading university in Angeles City, which has become a center for revival of the language. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i><br />
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<b>JN:</b> I want my mother tongue to be fully available online and in software, and to be able to utilize it, or for it to be utilized, in the modern digital media available to bigger or more powerful languages. (As it is, the new media have, in many cases, become additional factors for oppression and denigration, instead of fulfilling their potential as equalizers). Search engines, translators, computer/online games, and social media should be available in Kapampangan versions, so the language would then be able to hold its own and compete on equal terms with other languages, including those which have become the agents of its persecution and elimination in its native country.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-68194932697312178392011-08-22T04:00:00.000-07:002011-08-22T06:00:23.648-07:00“We're here, we're using this language”: Michael Bauer on Scottish Gaelic<i> Scottish Gaelic (a.k.a. "Scots Gaelic", <b>"</b>Gàidhlig", or just "Gaelic") is the Celtic language traditionally spoken in Scotland. It is closely related to my own language of Irish, and also to Manx Gaelic which is spoken on the Isle of Man. While it has a relatively healthy population of around 60,000 speakers (2001 census), there has been a steady shift to English over the last hundred years, even in the places where the language is the strongest and where it remains the primary community language, on Scotland's Western Isles. UNESCO's <a href="http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/">Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger</a> lists Gaelic as "definitely endangered".</i><br />
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<i> Gaelic has been used online for many years. Indeed, my friend <a href="http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/%7Ecaoimhin/">Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle</a>, who teaches Computing at <a href="http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/index_gd.html">Sabhal Mòr Ostaig</a>, the Gaelic-medium university on the Isle of Skye, co-founded the email list GAELIC-L as far back as 1989! You'll find more than twenty years of messages, millions of words of Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic, in the <a href="https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=GAELIC-L">archives of that list</a>.</i><br />
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<i> Over the last couple of years, a flurry of open source software packages has been made available in the language, mostly due to the tireless work of <a href="http://www.akerbeltz.org/">Michael Bauer</a>, who was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about the state of the language and some of his recent projects. Michael is self-employed as a full-time language consultant, providing what he calls "Gaelic Language Services": translation, proofreading, adult teaching, linguistic research, and, latterly, micro-publishing. He has produced some truly remarkable online resources for speakers of the language: a large bilingual dictionary (<a href="http://www.faclair.com/">Am Faclair Beag</a>), a high-quality digitized version of <a href="http://www.dwelly.info/">Dwelly's famous 1911 dictionary</a> (a massive undertaking, produced over a ten year period), an open source spell checker (<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scottish-gaelic-spell-checker/" target="_blank">An Dearbhair Beag</a>), and translations of several important software packages, including Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, and Freeciv, the open source version of the classic game "Civilisation". All of these projects were done on a purely volunteer basis, with no external funding </i>– <i>a good lesson for any small language groups that might be waiting for financial support before beginning terminology development or software translation projects! Since the launch of Indigenous Tweets in March, Michael has provided a huge amount of help to me personally, using his broad linguistic expertise to find tweets in several new languages. You'll find him on Twitter as <span class="screen-name screen-name-LowRisingTone pill"><a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/lowrisingtone">@LowRisingTone</a> and </span><span class="screen-name screen-name-akerbeltzalba pill"><a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/akerbeltzalba">@akerbeltzalba</a> (Gaelic tweets only).</span></i><style type="text/css">
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<b>KPS: </b><i>For readers unfamiliar with Scottish Gaelic, tell us a bit about the language, how many speakers, whether it's taught in schools, etc.</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> Scots Gaelic is in a peculiar situation today. It enjoys official support not seen for centuries while at the same time suffering severe attrition of speakers and usage. The 2011 census figures aren't out yet but in 2001, the census reported just under 60,000 speakers. That's just over 1% of the population and to put that into perspective, that's down from just over 200,000 (about 4.5% of the population) in 1901. The largest challenge posed to the language today is a mixture of rural depopulation, an ageing speaker demographic and a collapse of everyday usage in the remaining majority Gaelic-speaking communities up and down the West Coast. Yet at the same time, Gaelic-medium education (GME) is on the increase (though still pitifully low, with about 0.4% of all schoolchildren receiving GME), as are adult learner numbers, an improving offer of books published, there is a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/alba/">Gaelic TV channel</a> and a government broadly supportive of the language. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhWeFHwvfHBanjoAcVNDaQs7W1pISzysRQqGLj-pzS2CSOxvLWfkET5Zl7Di5mtY-RhaTCbwBhPOLMpg6yJsEkB-nrS_WmkREV7oZCSanvT5FS0jaOzFZB8ZdzmEt8tsrEa9OxKoezg/s1600/Crete0909060253.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhWeFHwvfHBanjoAcVNDaQs7W1pISzysRQqGLj-pzS2CSOxvLWfkET5Zl7Di5mtY-RhaTCbwBhPOLMpg6yJsEkB-nrS_WmkREV7oZCSanvT5FS0jaOzFZB8ZdzmEt8tsrEa9OxKoezg/s320/Crete0909060253.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Bauer</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Legally the language has a similarly ambiguous status – for example for immigration purposes, a knowledge of Scots Gaelic fulfils the legal requirements of speaking a UK language and you can sit the Citizenship Test in Gaelic but on the other hand, it's not an official language which you are entitled to use at an official level unless it happens to be on offer. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div>The other challenge it still faces is widespread ignorance of the language and its history in the general population. The curriculum makes little to no reference to the position of dominance the language enjoyed for centuries or the reasons for its decline and though a majority of people feels broadly supportive of the language, there is still much animosity towards the language and a vocal minority who feels it is irrelevant to Scottish identity in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. The emergence of the concept of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander (them) and the Scots or English-speaking Lowlander (us, for most) goes back so far that most simply aren't aware that there was a time when a Scot de facto spoke Gaelic.<b> </b><br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What opportunities are there to use the language online?</i><b> </b><br />
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<b>MB:</b> It's a mixed picture. Google has had a <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=gd">Gaelic interface</a> since about 2001 (which I started working on while at university) but I don't know what the uptake is. The main problem is that Google has a very strange approach to selecting which parts of their software suite are up for localisation and which aren't. For example the simple search interface is available, Google Docs isn't.<br />
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Facebook isn't available - their selection process is even stranger, but on the bright side, it doesn't seem to deter a lot of people from using the language on Facebook. And I know of a fair number of people who use the Irish interface. <br />
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There's an old release of OpenOffice (and I'm working on the update); Microsoft has been working on a (C)LIP [Language Interface Pack] for … oh, a long time but hasn't released anything yet. There are no localised operating systems but I personally feel that's a low priority. With limited resources, I always try to focus on projects which maximise impact. Few everyday users tinker with their OS on a daily basis and even fewer would be confident doing that in Gaelic – there is no Gaelic support team, and you have the problem that many computers are shared by speakers and non-speakers. So it's sort of on my to-do list but way down.<br />
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There are a few spell-checkers, only two of which are used widely (again thanks to you for helping us create one of them!). The <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scottish-gaelic-spell-checker/">Firefox app version</a> of one of them has about 400 daily users, which is encouraging. As is the increase in the number of Open Source software packages in general. Firefox was launched in Gaelic in 2010 (and I'd like to thank you for bullying me into that!), followed by Thunderbird (Mozilla's email program), an app for Firefox that let's you switch between interface languages (the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-locale-switcher/">Quick Locale Switcher</a>), and hopefully the upcoming release of <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/">Lightning</a>, Mozilla's calendar program, and a localised version of <a href="http://accentuate.us/">Accentuate.us</a> which automatically inserts grave accents. And then there's the re-release of the <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera browser</a> at the end of 2010 (the project had fallen dormant and way behind until I took it over in 2010). The <a href="http://www.phpbb.com/community/">phpBB forum interface</a> has also been translated by a friend and me, and is used in several places now.<br />
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There are three main dictionaries online now, plus a few smaller ones. One is essentially a big wordlist (the <a href="http://www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php">Stòr-dàta</a>), the other a digitised version of the nearest equivalent Gaelic has to the OED (<a href="http://www.dwelly.info/">Dwelly's dictionary</a>) and the third is a merger of Dwelly's and more modern material (called <a href="http://www.faclair.com/">Am Faclair Beag</a> 'the small dictionary'). Dwelly-d and Am Faclair Beag were developed between me and another friend who's a software developer in our free time (at least that's what other people call it).<br />
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There's a <a href="http://gd.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AComh-Dhuilleag">Gaelic Wikipedia</a> (the Uicipeid) which isn't doing too badly considering the number of speakers but we could do with more active editors, especially fluent ones. I hear the Welsh are thinking of giving retired Welsh teachers some training in how to edit Wikipedia to add more content, which might be a way forward for us too.<br />
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Beyond that, there's not much else but overall, the Open Source movement has been a great opportunity so far for Gaelic and will continue to benefit the language. I just wish I could clone myself!<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online, for many different reasons (orthography, terminology, etc.) How do speakers of your language feel about using the language online?</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> Depends on whether we're talking just casually using the language or using localised software. In terms of casual use, terminology on the whole is not a massive issue, both in speaking and writing the language people code-switch a lot and I've rarely come across complications when using an English term in a Gaelic phrase. The only way that usually happens is when you get a learner who hasn't yet developed enough sensitivity to adjust the number of newly coined words they use depending on their audience. That can be a bit of an issue.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXQ0XDKeaNVEf_VPvwBHlpc0OK2l_-8oa272lu2nHv6JZjbc9ZFzlQpkNyDYApzmlHi2cJZXUmMv9t6J2-T0HFoRV-jRf9MXyzLLYzXj0Vq2eKdK5m8E35GTB3KmJ1W2E99ZbrsVoAsw/s1600/P5040048.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXQ0XDKeaNVEf_VPvwBHlpc0OK2l_-8oa272lu2nHv6JZjbc9ZFzlQpkNyDYApzmlHi2cJZXUmMv9t6J2-T0HFoRV-jRf9MXyzLLYzXj0Vq2eKdK5m8E35GTB3KmJ1W2E99ZbrsVoAsw/s320/P5040048.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gaelic-medium school in Glasgow, Scotland</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Literacy is an issue for many older speakers that still needs addressing, sadly, which unfortunately reduces the number of potential users of the language online overall.<br />
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Translation of software on the other hand is an interesting challenge. There's not much that you cannot translate into Gaelic but the challenge is translating it in such a way that a non-technical user of the language can find their way around without having to resort to the dictionary all the time which tends to turn people off. But it can be done with a bit of forethought and a healthy approach to using loanwords. For example, when I was translating Firefox, we had to tackle the term 'export', quite a good example of subtle language engineering. There are several terms in dictionaries for the verb 'export' but they all try to carry the meaning by using native roots, for example 'às-mhalairt' – literally 'out-trade'. That sort of word sometimes works but in this instance it leaves most native speakers confused. So after some debate we settled on a new term, 'às-phortaich' or 'out-port' because it gives non-technical users more clues as to the meaning and that seems to have worked very well. The other aspect of this involves a bit of best practice in translation – when you get volunteers who translate software they often stick too close to the original language which results in really bad translations which put off end-users but if you get it right, it makes the localised versions much more readily acceptable to everyone, including non-technical native speakers.<br />
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The writing system is not too much of an issue – there is a grave accent (and an acute if you follow the traditional spelling) but casually, you can understand written Gaelic even without the accents. The one thing that causes minor headaches is the Gaelic ampersand – Gaelic doesn't use '&' but instead the so-called Tironian Ampersand ⁊. And most of you are probably seeing a square box now. QED. On the bright side, the mathematical operator ┐ looks just like it and bizarrely, displays widely so I tend to use that. I'm quite pleased that Mozilla and Opera have it. It may sound like a so-what issue but even Gaels are generally ignorant about the period where Ireland and Scotland were are the forefront of scholarship in Europe, writing in their own languages and with their own scribal tradition that it's an important little landmark for the language to have the ┐. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>How is computing terminology for Gaelic developed? Is there a "language board" or are terms developed naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they communicated to the community?</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> Yeees... good question. It's very haphazard. There's no official body that oversees terminology development so there are the usual gaps and the problem of too many terms for the same thing or indeed some terms getting overused.<br />
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Interestingly, being locale leader on Mozilla, Opera, phpBB, Google and other projects has allowed me to standardize at least web-terminology across most of the software on offer. For example, there are about 4 words each for copy, browser and import but virtually all now use the same terms. A very small number of people is upset about some of the choices but on the whole, people are glad that software is beginning to speak 'the same language'. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online?</i> <i>For example, differences in dialects, different spelling systems, problem with fonts, lack of computing expertise in the community, lack of interest from software vendors like Microsoft/Apple/Google?</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> All of the above? No, it's not that bad. Funnily enough, access to fast internet is what I'd put at the top of the list. The web is an increasing source of Gaelic stuff, from TV to radio and news, software, the web, access to services and so on. But access is not always straightforward, especially bearing in mind the geography of the West Coast with its many inhabited islands. So funnily enough, in this regard I'd ask Santa for superfast broadband in those remote Gaelic-speaking communities.<br />
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There are dialect issues but they're not insurmountable, fortunately the writing system is native and very old so usually a single spelling can accommodate a vast variety of pronunciations. For example the word 'bainne' (milk) has about a dozen pronunciations but fortunately they can all be derived from the same spelling.<br />
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With less than 60,000 speakers, interest from Apple & Co is as you'd expect. Low. Elsewhere, it's not quite that bad. The expertise is there but getting people to commit time is much more of a challenge. That and, which is not so much the fault of the community, the fact that even for the Open Source movement, localisation seems to be a bit of an afterthought. You could argue that the option was always there, which is true, but if you look at the processes within each project and across projects, they are nothing but arcane to your average educated user of any language.<br />
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It's a "you'd-think" thing – you'd think that there would be a central pool of translations for all Open Source projects (they're Open Source after all...), pooling all of OpenOffice, Mozilla, Linux, WikiTranslate and so on in one place, with each project able to draw upon this pool. Real-time would be nice but even a manual or nightly update would be great. Instead, I don't know how many times I have translated the word “Edit” or “Close”, “Save as” and so on. On their own, it doesn't seem like much but it adds up. And you have to remember that the ratio of speakers to localisers is big, scarily big. Gaelic has some 60,000 speakers and at the most, 2 1/2 people whom I would regard as being “regularly active” in unpaid localisation of Open Source software. Irish has somewhere between 80,000 to 100,000 highly fluent speakers and at a guesstimate, I'd say maybe half a dozen active people. If you look, for example, at the <a href="https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/shipping/dashboard">Mozilla localisation dashboard</a>, you'll find that even large languages like Bengali, Hebrew or Indonesian are struggling to stay up to date. So there's something in the localisation process that's not working as well as it could. Or should.<br />
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From a personal angle too, I would have translated Firefox a long time ago but being a good translator is quite obviously not good enough – don't get me wrong, the Mozilla team are great people and very supportive but it's still a big challenge to understand a lot of what you have to do. I wouldn't recommend it without the help of someone who can speak code. That's really something that the Open Source community needs to improve.<br />
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Related to that are the more general problems of translation and localisation – programmers in general are very keen to rush off and program some neat bit of code that will calculate your tax, make a roach dance rumba across your screen and remind you to eat and drink once in a while but they rarely seem to consider cross-linguistic issues. They write their code and then downstream, some poor translator is going insane because they chopped up sentences in a way that's ok in English but not any other language, or they go placeholder happy. It's getting better but there's still a lot that needs improving. Plurals for example are getting quite good these days. English has 1 file and 2+ files. So you'd often get things like “You are about to delete %s file” and “You are about to delete %s files” to translate. Let's just say that this is a pattern few languages follow... Today on most localisation projects you can specify which numbers go with which plurals, which is good. But there's still a lot of weird language appearing on screens because such issues are rarely thought about. For example, in English you can use a sentence like “Give me results in” and the just have a dropdown of language names. But in a lot of languages the preposition “in” plus a language name results in a variety of different outcomes. For example “in English” is “sa Bheurla” in Gaelic, but “in Japanese” is “san t-Seapanais”. Or worse, there are languages which don't do prepositions. In Basque for example you have to use an instrumental suffix, resulting in “Ingelesez” and “Japonieraz”. And usually, you don't have the option of having two lists of languages. So you end up with strange syntax and strange idiom, which isn't that great for the user. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoNddcHiGPIaYfKWAg_oVguurMbumbRqUiRl2bfFIEPoM3FEAszIMIgrLH33paLY32RjMEEux7-K5rDk-uTrdzvRYVjrTG1foQrAK-FvfQAQGvjOVbEsdQbi37ksils2F4lvB_yfCO6g/s1600/Eilean+Iarmain+78.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoNddcHiGPIaYfKWAg_oVguurMbumbRqUiRl2bfFIEPoM3FEAszIMIgrLH33paLY32RjMEEux7-K5rDk-uTrdzvRYVjrTG1foQrAK-FvfQAQGvjOVbEsdQbi37ksils2F4lvB_yfCO6g/s320/Eilean+Iarmain+78.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Language revitalization from below!</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like facebook and twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> Good question. If people between 20-35 are young, then yes. As for those under that age bracket, I think they are but I'm not sure, I'm not really connected to any really young people or following any. <br />
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But speaking of younger people, there's another project which isn't particularly technical but nonethless exciting. It's called the <i>Sgoil-Choimhearsnachd</i> or 'Community School'. The underlying issue we're trying to address is the fact that in a place like Glasgow, even though there are more than 10,000 speakers, they're hard to find. Also, perhaps only some 200 or so regulary show up at Gaelic cultural events – which means we're losing a lot of opportunities for interaction in Gaelic. Beyond that, there's not much on offer for adults as everything is centred on kids. Which is jolly good for the kids but what will they do after leaving school? Not to mention the age makeup of those 10,000 speakers...<br />
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Working on the bold assumption that as important as traditional stuff is, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Not every American shoots moose and not every Welshman owns a harp. So it's unreasonable to assume that every Gaelic-speaker likes waulking songs or indeed should like them. <br />
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So we ran a pilot where we got members of the community who were willing to pass on skills they have to run a 6 week pilot teaching 2 hours a week, offering an art course, Esperanto, creative writing, Tae Kwon Do, Jazz Dancing and Chinese arts and crafts – all taught through the medium of Gaelic. We had some problems with advertising and attendance but we hope to improve that next time round because the feedback was great, people really enjoyed doing something totally different where Gaelic wasn't the target but just a means of interacting. People have to pay a contribution which pays the tutor and the rooms and so on but split between several people, that's not a lot. We also don't require the tutors to have teaching qualifications or suchlike or indeed offer certificates – for the most part, people are just interested in the subjects. It's a very simple model but we have great hopes for it and I think it could be easily applied to other communities.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Tell me about the third picture above, of the "No Fouling" sign!</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> It's a picture I took on Skye. It's the other side of the coin, in a way the more precious one and the one that is much harder to achieve. It's just a cheap sign, a piece of wood on a stake with a laminated page someone ran off the printer. But in it stands for someone locally who decided to put their own language on the sign as well. No application for funding, no big fuss but a small bit of linguistic landscape that says “we're here, we're using this language”.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i><br />
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<b>MB:</b> In terms of technology, I think we can look forward to a few more programs and applications in the language, with Open Source playing an increasing role. In particular, I'd like to see smaller languages exploit the games niche more, perhaps even on a cross-national collaborative basis. If games can teach German speaking children English without a teacher, then that's something we cannot afford NOT to use. In a way I'm quite proud that 2011 is the year that saw the release of the first Scots Gaelic computer game (<a href="http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page">Freeciv</a> – the open source development of what many of you over 30 will remember as Civilisation II). It was fun doing the translation, actually, so much better scratching your head over how to say “The Basque catapult has been destroyed by the Babylonian horsemen” than some policy document. But I also can't believe it's 2011... we're really missing a trick here, given how much grief my mum used to give me over playing this game.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot of Freeciv in Scottish Gaelic</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
I'd also like to see speech technology advance, in particular to support speakers with shaky literacy. One item on my personal wishlist which probably won't happen is one I mentioned earlier – a shared online repository for all these localisation projects, linked into a better online translation memory. Sort of a mega-<a href="http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index?redirect=1">Pootle</a> with live suggestions bringing together Mozilla, OpenOffice, Linux and the rest. I waste a lot of time re-translating the same strings.<br />
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Overall... I'd like to see GME become compulsory in those areas that still have a strong Gaelic-speaking element, which also entails more teachers being trained. Less money on white, flashy elephants and more for someone to grapple with the thorny issue of seriously increasing language use in the Gaelic-speaking communities before we lose them. And nationally, better education about the historical role of Gaelic in Scottish history. Some of the views people have about Gaelic are about as down-to-earth as the birther debate in the United States.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-88922762017806845562011-07-21T09:15:00.000-07:002011-07-21T09:15:45.762-07:00RIP Neskie ManuelNeskie Manuel passed away recently after going missing from his family's campsite <span class="articlebodylist">on <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Niskonlith+Lake&hl=en&ll=50.79617,-119.765568&spn=0.093096,0.147457&sll=50.773813,-119.768829&sspn=0.361707,0.589828&t=h&z=13">Niskonlith Lake</a> in early May. He was my friend and sometime collaborator. He was also a radio broadcaster, film maker, open source software developer, cartographer, environmentalist, and avid cyclist (he <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=105884725347986313719.00000112f54aa61a5712e&ll=47.219568,-91.494141&spn=35.754786,88.769531&t=h&z=4">cycled across Canada</a> on a single-speed bike in 2007).</span><br />
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Last fall I spoke at an <a href="http://www.ilinative.org/">Indigenous Language Institute</a> workshop on technology and terminology development in New Mexico and I invited Neskie to come down and take part. That was the first time we'd met face-to-face and he made quite an impression on me. He was a brilliant person. He knew an incredible amount about software development, open source, and web technologies. I learned a lot from him about the political situation of the First Nations in Canada and about the environmental causes he cared about. We even talked for a while about theoretical physics and mathematical graph theory. As I recall he was interested in graph-theoretical questions related to semantic networks but I'm sorry to say I forget the details now. In short, he was full of ideas -- they were pouring out so fast I could barely keep up! <br />
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The main reason he came down was so that we could discuss the prospects for doing a translation of Firefox into <span class="st">his language of Secwepemctsín. Mozilla has held their last two "Summits" in British Columbia and I loved the idea of having the first translation of Firefox into a native American or First Nation language come from that part of the world. Neskie was enthusiastic and optimistic about the possibility. As he saw it, most of the resources needed were in place and it would just be a matter of generating interest among a group of people with the language skills to do the actual translation work -- he and I would handle the technical aspects. I'm sorry now that we never progressed any further than those initial discussions.</span><br />
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Neskie and I were of one mind in a lot of ways. We both believed in the potential of technology, computing, and social media to help strengthen indigenous and minority languages. At the same time, we also discussed the fact that technology is just a small piece in a much bigger puzzle of language revitalization, and that our work needed to be informed and driven by broader issues: linguistic rights, political self-determination, freedom from corporate influence, cultural survival. Not so long ago we had an email exchange about a piece I'd read in the (excellent) book "<a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Paradigm_wars.html?id=sN6AAAAAMAAJ">Paradigm Wars</a>", written by his father Arthur Manuel. I loved Neskie's response: "I've heard many of his arguments. I try to live and breathe them and apply them to other areas that I feel capable in, the main one being computing."<br />
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Neskie really liked the Indigenous Tweets project. I showed him a prototype of the site a few weeks before it was launched and he offered valuable suggestions for how it could be improved. He also did what is still the one and only tweet in <span class="st">Secwepemctsín, on March 12th: "ximulecw r tmicws r secwepemc" (</span>the secwepemc have a big land). During the 53 days he was missing I found comfort in those words, certain that he must be out there somewhere on his own, and that it was just a matter of time before he would return to his friends and family. I was heartbroken to find out I was wrong when his remains were found on June 29th. I'll miss you and will always remember you Neskie. Suaimhneas síoraí duit a chara.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-57288108114548298972011-06-21T06:00:00.000-07:002011-06-21T14:36:42.202-07:00Meeting the Challenge: Edmond Kachale on Chichewa<i>Chichewa is a Bantu language spoken in four countries in southern Africa; namely Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is widely spoken in Malawi where at one point it had official status as a national language. Currently, it is no longer a national language, but it is a popular lingua franca with 60% of the population having full command of the language and 75% able to understand it. In Zambia, it is the third most popular language, spoken mostly in the Eastern Province and in Lusaka, and it is among the seven official African languages. In Malawi, the language is taught in primary and secondary schools but never at tertiary levels, except for those specialising in African languages, where students learn the structure of the language (through the medium of English)<b>.</b> </i><br />
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<i>Chichewa, like other Bantu languages, has a very complicated verbal system; a single verb root can take on thousands or even </i>millions<i> of different forms, depending on such things as tense, agreement with subject and object nouns, and a number of other features. <b> </b>This makes even simple computer applications like spell checkers exceedingly challenging. For speakers of similarly-complicated languages, one of the takeaway messages from the interview below is that tackling these challenges </i>is<i> possible, and even one person can make great strides.</i><br />
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<i>Edmond Kachale is a software developer by profession, based in Malawi, and has been involved in developing natural language processing tools for Chichewa for several years now. When I began working on Chichewa in around 2004 there were virtually no resources for the language, not even a good electronic word list. Now, thanks to Edmond's efforts, there are some advanced resources such as a part-of-speech tagger (ChicPOS), tools for morphological analysis and generation (ChicMorph, AffixGen), and a program for visualizing phrase structure (ChiVisualize). He has also been involved in translating important software packages and web sites into Chichewa, including the Google search interface. Edmond tweets in Chichewa and English as <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/ceekays">@ceekays</a>, and also writes the blog <a href="http://edceekays.blogspot.com/">Edmond pa Kanjedza</a>, where you'll find descriptions and screenshots of some of the software just mentioned.</i><b> </b><br />
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<b>KPS: </b><i>Chichewa has an interesting history in terms of its status as an official language in Malawi. Please tell us a bit about that.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edmond Kachale</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>EK</b>: Indeed, Chichewa was previously declared by the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Banda">Hastings Kamuzu Banda</a>, the First Head of State and Government, as the national language because the president himself was also a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewa_people">Chewa</a>. But with the coming in of the democracy and the change of government administration from Kamuzu Banda to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakili_Muluzi">Bakili Muluzi</a>, Chichewa lost its status as a national language on grounds that it was discriminatory to other indigenous languages. It became one of the official lingua francas in Malawi, together with Chitumbuka, Chiyao, Chilhomwe and Chisena. Even the current Malawian Constitution highlights this. Of course, Chichewa remains the only indigenous language that is taught in schools, though some linguists and educationalists are fighting for the other indigenous languages outlined above to be taught in (primary) schools too. I have been following two policies that are addressing the issue of indigenous languages in schools: 'Language in Education' Policy (LIE) and 'Language Across the Curriculum' Policy (LAC). The first policy seeks to guide on which language should used for what subject matter or which language should be taught as a subject. On the other hand, LAC advocates for use of a familiar language as medium of instruction in [primary] schools. Unfortunately, none have been adopted yet.<br />
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The then Chichewa Board was dissolved and replaced by the <a href="http://www.unima-cls.org/">Centre of Language Studies</a> (CLS). CLS was established to reflect the change in the status of Chichewa language as a national language. It was mandated to conduct research mainly on indigenous languages. Of course, right now the Chichewa Board has made a comeback and is sometimes referred by a new name, Chichewa Heritage Foundation. In addition, it has realigned its duties to focus on promotion and preservation of the other unifying cultural factors of the Chewa than the language itself. They focus on dances, Kulamba Ceremony (Paying Homage to the Paramount Chief, Kalonga Gawa Undi (implying His Lordship Gawa Undi) currently resident in Zambia) and other customs. Interestingly, the foundation/board pays less attention to the issue of language development itself.<b> </b><br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Chichewa (or "Chicheŵa"!) is written with just one diacritical mark, the w-with-circumflex (ŵ), but as I understand it, there has been some disagreement over its use in spelling. What is the history of this letter and where do things stand now?</i><br />
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EK: Kamuzu Banda was said to be an authority (encyclopedia) of Chichewa. Even though he used to speak in English, when his [Chichewa] interpreter would make a mistake he would correct him right away. He was given an honorary Professorship of Chichewa by the University of Malawi for setting most of the rules of Chichewa grammar, including emphasizing the use of the bilabial affricative ŵ.[Around the time of his departure from power,] ŵ was removed from the writing/alphabet system. Currently, it is still fighting for its way in with the "linguistic courts" (i.e. linguistic forums). It is also trying to enter via the back door into the Chitumbuka orthographical system. I have also observed that primary school books written in Chichewa still have ŵ, while Chichewa language and grammar books used in secondary/high schools do not have it. A grammatical confusion!!<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What opportunities are there to use the language online? Is internet connectivity or access to computers an issue for your community? How about translations of software and websites?</i><br />
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<b>EK: </b>Like other Bantu languages, usage of Chichewa in computing technologies is very marginal. However, there are a number of opportunities to use Chichewa online. Malawi has an agro-based type of economy. Most farmers live in remote areas and do not understand English, which is Malawi's official business language. This is reason enough to have software (like word processors and spreadsheets) and online content in Chichewa.<br />
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Currently, there are a few websites with Chichewa articles. There are also a few Wikipedia entries on the <a href="http://ny.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsamba_Lalikulu">Chichewa/Chinyanja portal</a>. In addition, the language is used on Google. There are four homepages that are enjoying this: <a href="http://www.google.mw/">Google Malawi</a>, <a href="http://www.google.co.mz/">Google Mozambique</a>, <a href="http://www.google.co.zm/">Google Zambia</a> and <a href="http://www.google.co.zw/">Google Zimbabwe</a>. <br />
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There is also one website that has a <a href="http://www.chichewadictionary.org/">bilingual online dictionary</a>. It offers a Chichewa to English (and vice versa) dictionary. It also provides other Chichewa resources though at a limited scale, but the online dictionary is their great artwork. These resources are available to paid registered members only.<br />
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Access to computers is a very big issue in my society. Close to 60% of the society are poor and cannot afford buying computers. In addition, most of these people live in rural areas where issues of computer access, internet connectivity and power supply are big problems. Thus, the computer and the internet have not been fully embraced in my society.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaQuH4vQzdOgDsm6-mTVFwAUFqVzS0eVnPiphrfwj4RvFYMWrvBoIgetHdWv-KTSFUKIB2ZyXTOwe1DKXZ85c-aE4cfM3iR_H8rbz-Bw-v1b-4fvPgWuGzaduXTH_l6AIkiWvENrBX6g/s1600/girls-playing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaQuH4vQzdOgDsm6-mTVFwAUFqVzS0eVnPiphrfwj4RvFYMWrvBoIgetHdWv-KTSFUKIB2ZyXTOwe1DKXZ85c-aE4cfM3iR_H8rbz-Bw-v1b-4fvPgWuGzaduXTH_l6AIkiWvENrBX6g/s320/girls-playing.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Malawian girls playing netball</td></tr>
</tbody></table>There are efforts to develop localised software in Chichewa. Currently, there are spell-checking plugins for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox, though the latter has not yet found its way to the official Mozilla Addons page yet. There were once some talks to localise the OpenOffice.org Office package and the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and they were backed up by Government authorities, but now they have proved futile as there has been no progress at all. However there are still people who are interested in furthering this initiative. There was also another intervention to develop an online Bantu dictionary by one of the local language authorities, but the idea died in its premature stages.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online, because of difficulties with keyboard input, or because they don't know terminology for talking about computing, or simply because they learned computing in a language like English or French. Are any of these issues relevant for speakers of your language? What is the general attitude toward using the language online? </i> <br />
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<b>EK:</b> I think I can agree that these sentiments are very common among most less popular languages like ours. Indeed most Malawians feel ashamed to associate themselves with the language. A question of the usage of a language in Malawi is determined by factors such as status and attitudes towards what language is indigenous vis-à-vis what language provides more economic opportunities. Generally, local languages are associated with illiteracy and poverty. As such, there are a few people that are often comfortable to express themselves in the vernacular. I remember having outlined similar arguments in <a href="http://www.osisa.org/resources/docs/PDFs/OpenSpace-Nov2008/2_3_language_p088-094_edmond_kachale.pdf">one paper that was published online by OSISA</a>.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigYSg4aGb0wCuh3lNrzRGkvolqX4FDFayjVnihsoYd3-ki9mZBojSpltv5oNqUkEAGS13cwc7YTMHYwxEk8gUXjomrjzTbJalCIb3ip28KgjHbqSjayDJWgK5EH2UtVuy2pBhW3LYwEA/s1600/Lake-malawi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigYSg4aGb0wCuh3lNrzRGkvolqX4FDFayjVnihsoYd3-ki9mZBojSpltv5oNqUkEAGS13cwc7YTMHYwxEk8gUXjomrjzTbJalCIb3ip28KgjHbqSjayDJWgK5EH2UtVuy2pBhW3LYwEA/s320/Lake-malawi.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lake Malawi</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
Of course, in addition to these arguments I have heard most people saying Chichewa has a complex writing system, Chichewa has less scientific terminologies and other arguments as you have rightly outlined them. But to the contrary too, people have often times blamed me (among other frequent users of Chichewa online) for using deep words in expressing myself, especially when it comes to computing terms. So I do not understand where the issue of “Chichewa being shallow” comes from.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>I mentioned above that many indigenous languages lack computing terminology. Is this an issue for your language? How is/was terminology developed?</i><br />
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<b>EK:</b> Yes, for sure! Our language is another victim of “lack of computing terminology syndrome”. I remember one linguist, Prof. Pascal Kishindo, also observing the same that scientific and technological terminology in Chichewa in a disordered state. Currently, the media and other corporate stakeholders are left on their own to deal with the plethora of new foreign scientific terminology. The media (TV, radios and newspapers) sometimes mislead people with wrong spellings and meaningless terms, often they are English-based paraphrased loanwords like "kompuyta" for computer, and "pulinta/printa" for printer. <br />
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Frankly, I am not a fan of official standardized terminologies. I have often felt that standardization limits language enhancement through development of terminological synonyms. Thus, standardized terminologies limit communities from developing new words for the same term. I have always believed that the communities should be left at liberty to develop terms on their own, thereby enriching the language database. This is how words like "email", "laptop" and "netizen" found their way into the English vocabulary. What we need is a body that will only be collecting and documenting such terms, and disseminate them by publishing new dictionaries or public gazettes at least annually.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyD-tvvqRFXm-eS-3Gp9vxOux6xE74_0SVOys3fxU-AWgJpC339WSkz2CsncHZUSzFjfnmduFqu3mty3vOJOgENBa2YC_DoKLXRsrCHJzaWJuAUv9XQtndAt8cOXb5xYI6ZvbJE975g/s1600/children-playing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyD-tvvqRFXm-eS-3Gp9vxOux6xE74_0SVOys3fxU-AWgJpC339WSkz2CsncHZUSzFjfnmduFqu3mty3vOJOgENBa2YC_DoKLXRsrCHJzaWJuAUv9XQtndAt8cOXb5xYI6ZvbJE975g/s320/children-playing.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Malawian children playing</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Despite the current state of affairs, I am not happy with the way the media deal with new terms. They are lazy in generating pure Chichewa terminologies for the fast growing technology usage. Now, it is becoming a challenge for Chichewa speakers to manage the constantly rising communicative complexity induced by these paraphrased loanwords in their communities. Paraphrased loanwords do not make use of the inherent terminology “generators” of the language. In addition, these loanwords often break grammatical rules. For example, in Chichewa the word <i>printa</i> (printer) is wrong in several aspects, some of which include the following: (i) the consonant combination <i>pr</i> is non-existent, (ii) the plural form <i>maprinta</i> breaks the formal classification structure of nouns in not only Chichewa but also the entire Bantu noun classification system, as it traverses from a singular of class 9 to form a plural of class 6 instead of class 10, which is ungrammatical and semantically senseless!<br />
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Of course, there is the Chichewa Board but it is more interested in promoting and preserving cultural customs and traditions of the Chewa tribe than in the development of the language itself. In addition, there is the <a href="http://www.unima-cls.org/">Centre for Language Studies</a>, an academic research centre in the University of Malawi, which deals very much with issues of language development, from standardization of writing system (orthography) through to development of terminologies. Chichewa has been one of the language receiving more attention at the Centre to extent that they were able to produce Mtanthauzira-Mawu, a monolingual Chichewa dictionary. However, of late the Centre has been receiving less attention due to funding issues and “technical” restructuring within the University. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online?</i><br />
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<b>EK:</b> There are several challenges. Issues of dialect differences are a common denominator, I think, across most indigenous languages. These are sometimes accelerated by prejudice and exasperation from tribes that claim to ancestrally own the indigenous languages. Within Malawi, people from various regions speak differing dialects with differences in spelling systems. The situation is worse when one crosses Malawian borders to Mozambique, Zambia or Zimbabwe where the Chichewa that is spoken there is completely divergent from the standard one in both grammatical and semantical structures.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieZcGAimN6fI8WtfylG-NOhFtxaATVRYLhn_f09KqdZ0YM664sG3xfpiz9NRsC3hvGCrpqNuRu27T5roMybhFiD50YCfM81P__-QXPDQG2e4r6IsQuz0RUQqOB6V41ferRE6Sm74lQNA/s1600/tea-plantations.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieZcGAimN6fI8WtfylG-NOhFtxaATVRYLhn_f09KqdZ0YM664sG3xfpiz9NRsC3hvGCrpqNuRu27T5roMybhFiD50YCfM81P__-QXPDQG2e4r6IsQuz0RUQqOB6V41ferRE6Sm74lQNA/s320/tea-plantations.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tea plantations</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
National politics and “cold tribal wars” also play a part in impinging development of Chichewa. When one starts issues of development or promotion of indigenous languages in Malawi, they are likely to be unfruitful as they end up in emotional damages deep-cutting into some sort of tribal competitions over language dominance and inborn prejudice over other indigenous languages. This is a very big problem even in Zambia to the extent that the government there had to declare that English is the national language as well as official mode of communication.<br />
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Another challenge is that there is less interest from foreign investors in ICT projects for the language itself. In contrast to the situation with other popular African languages like Kiswahili and Zulu, there is less tendency to assume that indigenous Malawian languages will be used on some level, especially that which is economically-oriented. I have tried contacting Microsoft on the possibilities of developing localised systems, but it is almost two years since I wrote them; all I got was “I have forwarded your request to right authorities”. I have never heard of any efforts from Apple on development of technology for Chichewa. With John Duffel, a friend of mine, I once proposed to Facebook to add Chichewa to the list of translations to allow us localise facebook.com, just as other friends have done. But our efforts have led us nowhere as they have not responded yet since our proposal two years ago.<br />
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However, I should commend Google for its positive intervention. We are now proud that we have a Chichewa version of Google Web Search as explained above. In addition, there are talks on extending the localization project to other significant applications like Gmail. Using Google Technology User Group (GTUGs) set up in Malawi, Google is also working with local developers in trying to promote development of applications using its API that will have local usage.<br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like facebook and twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i><br />
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<b>EK:</b> Yes, to some extent people are using Chichewa online, especially the youth. In addition, as I alluded to earlier, there are a few websites that publish articles in Chichewa. Social networks also encourage usage of the language online. Of course, language use on social forums has led to excessive growth of code-switching between English and Chichewa phrases, leading into the development a new Internet language altogether. For example, someone may say "Ndikupanga apudeti pa Fesibuku" to mean "I will update you on Facebook" or they can also say "Ndinayesa kuchigugula" to mean "I tried to google for it".<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi126WhgN_vkbGremCE0WU025wfr4jOcd0TXo9hzy0h2OqeOKuBaZg3fvLAO1xl6DhQ8p89E34PO-J-xobetB_YHCHEg-Z7wLMTMrYibtL5YDtcpNKH4JQtSq1HRZGnZ0U2lNBXFWz6kg/s1600/mulanje-mt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi126WhgN_vkbGremCE0WU025wfr4jOcd0TXo9hzy0h2OqeOKuBaZg3fvLAO1xl6DhQ8p89E34PO-J-xobetB_YHCHEg-Z7wLMTMrYibtL5YDtcpNKH4JQtSq1HRZGnZ0U2lNBXFWz6kg/s320/mulanje-mt.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mulanje Mountain, highest mountain in Malawi</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use? </i><br />
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<b>EK:</b> This question a bit difficult to answer affirmatively because there are so many factors that can affect the usage of the language in ICT. But in general, if the situation on the ground does not change, ten years will come like a tick of a second. The Centre for Language Studies needs a special intervention and the Chichewa Board needs a different approach for the language to develop and have rich resources. I hope we need a multi-sectoral approach; both the government and private investors should take the issue of language use and development earnestly. Especially the government's intervention is very significant. I observed that due to political influence on natural development in Africa, some issues like those that concern language development cannot move without government intervention.<br />
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In terms of online content, I think we can do better than what we already have. Currently, much web content with intended local application, even concerning Malawians themselves and originating from Malawi, tend to use languages understood internationally, especially English. In addition, content on the Internet should also incorporate the subject matter that reflects the culture and the needs of the Malawian nation. <br />
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From the software perspective, there is a need for many Malawian developers to start working on localised systems. Otherwise we are way far behind, and if this continues like this, we will just be watching as the technological era passes us by. I have always believed that localization is another way of preserving and enhancing language. If we can take local content (such as games and systems) online, and spicing them with localised content, that will be a great stride. With high illiteracy levels, we may also want to take advantage of other forms of technology to preserve our ideas. For example, working on animations for most of the popular folk tales will do us more good, making technology more exciting and appropriate to our community. Of course, I also recognise that some few local developers have already started but we need more and more developers to join the bandwagon.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-40018558061730152192011-06-07T07:00:00.000-07:002011-06-07T13:16:34.323-07:00Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam: Keola Donaghy on the Hawaiian language<i> Hawaiian is on the long list of languages I've been trying to learn, going back to my first visit to the islands in 1996. Many years ago I started work on a spell checker for the language, using data gathered by <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/">my web crawler</a> which finds all web pages written in Hawaiian (and <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/stadas.html">many other languages</a>), and generates lists of words from those pages to be edited. In scanning web-crawled word lists, it's not unusual to encounter the occasional word in English, but I was pretty surprised, while editing Hawaiian word lists in 2004, to come across the word "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhr%C3%A1n">bodhrán</a>", an Irish word for a kind of drum used in traditional Irish music. Investigating further, the word appeared in a blog by someone named Keola Donaghy, a Hawaiian speaker who had travelled to Glen Colm Cille in Ireland to learn the Irish language for a summer in 2002. I wrote to Keola and he immediately began helping with the spell checker project, and has provided much-needed language expertise on several other projects over the years, for example by testing Hawaiian support for the <a href="http://accentuate.us/">accentuate.us</a> Firefox add-on, and more recently by translating the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/haw/">Hawaiian Indigenous Tweets</a> page. For indigenous languages with small speaker populations, there tends to be just one "go-to" person who is involved in just about every technology project; Keola is that person for Hawaiian. He's never said "no" any time I've asked for help over the last seven years.</i><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIL1_fhkGvEs0toeyydcOKiT1q6NfuVjhtYiHvpFlmxXTwb3EEXDXXkQJx3Os3U5r7tFnG_4uPk_qYJNzOwae6VMNc0v3DGBvdZM4oxT5giR_M3ilZE9xachkPOPGgsO7RmT4dVkNp8A/s1600/keola200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIL1_fhkGvEs0toeyydcOKiT1q6NfuVjhtYiHvpFlmxXTwb3EEXDXXkQJx3Os3U5r7tFnG_4uPk_qYJNzOwae6VMNc0v3DGBvdZM4oxT5giR_M3ilZE9xachkPOPGgsO7RmT4dVkNp8A/s1600/keola200.jpg" /></a></i></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keola Donaghy<i><br />
</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Keola is now Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. He is also a composer and musician, and an active member of the music scene in Hawai‘i. He tweets in English and Hawaiian as <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/keoladonaghy">@keoladonaghy</a>.</i><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The title of this post, "Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam" is a famous Irish saying that Keola uses in his email signature (and which could be the motto for the whole Indigenous Tweets project); it means </i><i>"Country without a language, country without a soul"!</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>KPS</b>: <i>Could you tell us a bit about the current state of the language? How many speakers are there, and how many children are learning the language?</i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>KD</b>: </span>Estimates vary, depending on what degree of fluency is being considered. I believe that no more that 10,000 are conversant, that is, could function in Hawaiian all day if necessary. The number is probably lower. While the numbers have increased during the past 20 years, I believe it has reached a plateau and significant effort will need to be extended to again begin growing. The language is officially recognized by our State in its constitution, however, in everyday life it is still not afforded the same level of support as some immigrant languages. Hawaiian is taught in immersion schools K-12, and <a href="http://hilo.hawaii.edu/academics/hawn/">Ka Haka ‘Ula o Ke‘elikōlani</a> at UH-Hilo uses Hawaiian exclusively in all undergraduate and many graduate level courses. Many high schools in the state teach Hawaiian as an elective, but it is not a required subject in any of them. There are approximately 2,000 students in K-12 Hawaiian medium education. Most native speakers are either elderly or residents of the island of Ni‘ihau. The total of all of these number around 500-600. Nearly all language instruction in the state outside of the Ni‘ihau community is done by non-native speakers, such as myself.<br />
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<span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>KPS</b>: <i>What opportunities are there to use Hawaiian online, in terms of hardware and software support, translated software, web sites, etc.?</i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><b>KD</b>: Hawaiian is supported by Mac OS X. There is a Hawaiian keyboard, localized date and time strings as well as Hawaiian sorting in the system. We've translated many programs into Hawaiian, including an integrated communication system (email, discussion forums, chat rooms, file transfers) called Leokī, which is based on the <a href="http://www.firstclass.com/">FirstClass</a> system. We've translated the entire interface and all communication system is done in Hawaiian. The system has been used for nearly 18 years. We have <a href="http://wehewehe.olelo.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/hdict?e=q-0hdict--00-0-0--010---4----den--0-000l--1haw-Zz-1---Zz-1-home---00031-0000escapewin-00&d=&l=en">online dictionaries</a>, <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hawaiian-spell-checker/">spell checkers</a>, and a vast digital repository of Hawaiian language on <a href="http://www.ulukau.org/">Ulukau.</a> </div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;">Since Hawaiian is based on the Latin alphabet with some diacritics, it is well supported in Unicode. Hawaiian works on a variety of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many open source programs like Moodle, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others require only minor tweaks to their CSS files to be able handle the language.</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">We would like to have official support for Hawaiian in Windows like we do in Macintosh and iOS, and hope that it will happen someday</span></span>. In the interim, we offer a <a href="http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/enehana/winkbd.php">Hawaiian keyboard</a> that people can download and install for free. The iPhone, iPod, and iPad all have native support for Hawaiian. We now have a <a href="http://code.google.com/p/softkeyboard/downloads/list">free Hawaiian keyboard for the Android operating system</a> that users can download and install.<br />
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<b>KPS</b>: <i>The <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=haw">Google search interface</a> has been available in Hawaiian for some time now. Many other language groups are interested in taking this step as well - can you tell us how you started on this, and what was entailed in completing the translation?</i><br />
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KD: I had tried for years to reach someone in the Google In Your Language [GIYL] program about localizing the search interface. I thought it would be very significant symbolically for us, and perhaps get our foot in the door with doing further work with Google. Finally in late 2008 I heard that Google had done a Māori language version. Since I know most of the Māori folks involved in technology issues for the language, I made some inquiries, and found out my friend Te Taka Keegan was responsible. Not only that, but he was about to do a 6 month post-doc at Google to help with localization issue. I contacted him, he put me in touch with the right person at Google. Once they set up a Hawaiian link for GIYL, it was quite painless to do the translation–it was entirely web based, showed the English text, provided a block for submitting the Hawaiian, and provided the context of the word or sentence to be translated. It took me about 6 months of on-and-off work – mostly in my spare time – to do. Maintenance is likewise a breeze – when new strings need translation or older ones have changed, they appear in the translation console, and are submitted. The changes do not get committed to the Google search page immediately; I have to notify the coordinator and they do a rebuild of the interface. I am a bit behind in doing updates, but hope to get caught up again this summer. </div><div class="im" style="font-family: inherit;"><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOBh6XIp5ATyky7FfYL256NOlc8gmKFlEWj0AutuCl4deU_obwwRGhGZnaomP-dly-UH052_9manB6EA2K8iypI4UCXZcTL_FOtLOjrSuowZEZQhlovrfhHMBrD0aVFfzvAYFZE-trvg/s1600/keolaOideasGael.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOBh6XIp5ATyky7FfYL256NOlc8gmKFlEWj0AutuCl4deU_obwwRGhGZnaomP-dly-UH052_9manB6EA2K8iypI4UCXZcTL_FOtLOjrSuowZEZQhlovrfhHMBrD0aVFfzvAYFZE-trvg/s320/keolaOideasGael.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keola in Glen Colm Cille, Co. Donegal, Ireland</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div><span style="border-collapse: separate; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>KPS: </b><i>What issues are there in terms of getting Hawaiian speakers to use the language online? Have problems with keyboards and fonts been an issue? What about computing terminology?</i></span><br />
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</b></span></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><b>KD:</b> I don't think lack of support for the diacritics have hampered the use of the language. I know many people who are using Hawaiian on Facebook without the diacritics, and receive many emails that don't either. Most are happy to be able to do so, and have when they've learned about he availability of tools. I can't tell you how many people I've spoken to how, despite our best efforts to make it known, were unaware that Mac OS has had a Hawaiian keyboard as a default since 2002. </div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;">I don't believe people not knowing the terminology for technology has been an impediment. There hasn't been a whole lot of discourse about the technology, we want to use it in the same way that everyone else does, so it has many uses in many contexts. The technology itself is only a small part of it.</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><b>KPS</b>: <i>How is terminology developed? Is there a "language board" the decides on terms and disseminates them to the community?</i><b> </b><br />
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<b>KD</b>: There is a lexicon committee that is coordinated by our College of Hawaiian Language. I have participated in this and have contributed many words. There are a variety of methods used: transliteration, translation, borrowing from other languages. All are considered. When a need for a new word comes up, we address it. Because of a backlog of words, we occasionally create words, start using them, and they are picked up. An example is <i>ho‘olele hualono</i> for "podcast". <i>Ho‘olele</i> is an already established word for "broadcast". <i>Hua</i> is "seed" or "pod", and <i>lono</i> is to "hear" as opposed to "listen" (subtle difference). I created a Hawaiian language podcast, coined the word with input from a committee member but no official approval. It's been widely accepted.<b> </b><br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Any other special challenges Hawaiian speakers face in terms of developing technology for the language? </i></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"><br />
</div><div><b>KD:</b> Vendors have been very supportive, and I'm sure the fact that our work has gotten a lot of publicity doesn't hurt. Dialects and spelling system differences are non-issues. The most annoying tech issue is that few fonts have the ‘okina (glottal) in the Unicode location that we prefer. I've talked to both Microsoft and Apple about it, but realize that since fonts are developed by outside foundries, it will take a while.<br />
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</div><div></div><div><b>KPS</b>: <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i><br />
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</div><div class="im"><div></div><div><b>KD:</b> Absolutely. I have a number of friends and classmates of my daughter (20) on Facebook. All were Hawaiian immersion students. I've notice that while they occasionally use English between themselves, they always use Hawaiian with me. I think sometimes they also use it as a way to exclude non-Hawaiian speakers from knowing what they are talking about. They dynamics of their use and choices are interesting, and I'd love to research and study it sometime.<b> </b><br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i></div><div class="im"><div><br />
<b>KD</b>: Basically my vision is that Hawaiian use with technology be as easy as any other language. If people want to use a service or system, it's available to them in Hawaiian. But our pool of resources is very limited, so we must prioritize carefully and make sure we get the most bang for the buck/effort. Having a Hawaiian keyboard and our characters as core system-level supported elements is the first step. We're getting there with both desktop and mobile systems, but still have much more to go.</div></div></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div><br />
</div><div>I would very much like to see localization systems mature to the point where we can have a single repository of translated strings that all of our projects could draw from, rather than starting from scratch with so many new things. I would love to see Hawaiian voice synthesis and voice recognition happen, but personally don't have the technical skills to do it myself.</div></div>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-50002838176986147842011-05-23T06:00:00.000-07:002011-05-23T06:00:14.920-07:00Why Haitian Creole? The question I've been asked most often about the Indigenous Tweets site is this: "Why would people choose to tweet in a language with so few speakers when they could have a much wider audience by using English, French, or Spanish?" I have my own answers to this question, but what I'd like to do is hear directly from the people who are choosing to use their native language on Twitter every day. Jean Came Poulard, who was <a href="http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.com/2011/05/after-quake-jean-came-poulard-on.html">interviewed here last week</a>, contacted the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ht/">top three tweeters in Haitian Creole</a> about this question and got some fascinating answers, touching on issues from literacy to diaspora communities to using machine translation to bridge the language gap. Without further ado, here are the top three tweeters:<br />
<ul><li>Schmidt Marseille (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/PIKGLAS">@pikglas</a>) is a 20 year old Haitian living in New Jersey, USA. He is currently a student in criminal justice, and loves social media, sports and music.</li>
<li>Carel Pedre (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/carelpedre">@carelpedre</a>) is a radio and TV host in Haiti, and could be heard broadcasting news following the 7.3 earthquake last January.</li>
<li><span>Ricardo Vintris (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/twitjako">@twitjako</a>) </span><span>promotes Creole rap music, maintains the twitjako.com web site, and loves sharing ideas, opinions, anecdotes and jokes via Twitter. </span></li>
</ul> <b>JCP:</b> <span>Why are you tweeting in Haitian Creole?</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">@twitjako</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><span><b>@twitjako:</b> I tweet in Creole for a lot reasons, let me mention two for you.<span> </span>First, I think and I believe the Creole language is the best way to communicate to my people living in Haiti or abroad; <sup></sup>second, I want to use Creole as education tool to teach people their <i>civil rights</i>, because one of the main handicaps in Haiti’s development is ignorance, and ignorance begins with <i>misunderstanding</i> and <i>lack of communication</i>. Communication has to be a way to express yourself freely and be understood. To be understood requires a proper language; as a Haitian, I think the proper language is Creole. We have a proverb "Kreyòl Pale Kreyòl Konprann" [</span><span>Creole Speaking, Creole Understanding].</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Sometimes I tweet in French and rarely in English. When I tweet in French it is just to address to some people that I get in my network, or in a quote. I have to tell you that French is not really a language of communication for Haiti, even if we have this language as one of two official languages. So, we speak French when we want to print some ideas or want to be respected or tell to people that you were in school because going to school in Haiti is still a privilege and not an obligation. English?? Rarely do I use this language to tweet, then I always ask myself why I have to tweet in English because we've got a creolophone country even if I use an international network like twitter. And unfortunately I don’t master the English language (lol). <span> </span>The main goal of twitjako is to speak to the Haitian People in order to get a new mentality on how we are living via Questions and Opinions.<span> </span>Regarding my goal, I think Creole is appropriate to get the wider audience I need.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQxo0X1B7GxPIHpKaIcW8DU51lLXhvV_GGXCUbr8xj5_UA06XSF-jSx2mBdnA46VLIWLY73NhPR6_Chygn7ZAy2sK7Tpdhpey_EAbyVYvgDaIBMsKCTDM0cYBsJwqzcDeGnSimqgA5A/s1600/pikglas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQxo0X1B7GxPIHpKaIcW8DU51lLXhvV_GGXCUbr8xj5_UA06XSF-jSx2mBdnA46VLIWLY73NhPR6_Chygn7ZAy2sK7Tpdhpey_EAbyVYvgDaIBMsKCTDM0cYBsJwqzcDeGnSimqgA5A/s1600/pikglas.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">@pikglas</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><b>@pikglas:</b> </span>I tweet in Haitian Creole mainly because it is my native language, and sometimes the best way to express yourself is by using your native language. I do tweet in English too and a few times in French, I always found a way to balance those three languages, I don't really care about having a wider audience, I just speak my mind and that is it.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkgdlDoRgAkYJGkySPS6xzBZMMdih4ZVSQWuSSqALzbKAH2I_sRJDduuLx47g2Ix8eQ9EZX-7k-OHWYSAW9Ej9zHYF7bZJuxp5HC6DfmkU-uK2ogD-UDDCSIHfOub7RsspNhlE2H_DPw/s1600/carelpedre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkgdlDoRgAkYJGkySPS6xzBZMMdih4ZVSQWuSSqALzbKAH2I_sRJDduuLx47g2Ix8eQ9EZX-7k-OHWYSAW9Ej9zHYF7bZJuxp5HC6DfmkU-uK2ogD-UDDCSIHfOub7RsspNhlE2H_DPw/s200/carelpedre.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>@carelpedre:</b> I tweet in Haitian Creole because I'm Haitian. Creole is my native language, I speak Creole everyday. My Language is my pride, it's a way to let everybody know that I'm 100% Haitian. French is my second language but I don't tweet in French because the majority of my Haitian followers live in the USA or Canada and the other ones will understand English anyway. I have a lot of Non-Haitian followers. When I tweet something in Creole I know some of them will use Google Translate to get the meaning.<br />
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</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> JCP:</b> What is your vision for the language in the next 10 years, and how do you see yourself contributing to that vision?</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>@twitjako:</b> <span>My vision is to see all online documents in Creole, my keyboard, my browser, my twitter, my facebook, my mozilla… all in Haitian Creole as we have <a href="http://google.ht/" target="_blank">google.ht</a> in Creole. I think we have made a good start, because we can listen and read Creole on the radio anytime, on the web, TV shows and so on. Imagine if we got 10 million Haitians <i>using</i> Creole to do everything, as Americans do with the English language??? </span><span>I would like to encourage Haitian People to get involved in this new way to communicate around the world, especially in Creole…<span> </span>I know it’s difficult for a country like Haiti to get a lot of people in the computer world because electricity, computers, Internet are lacking and expensive. One more thing, we have to be trained to manipulate the computer and Internet and the big handicap is that a large part of Haiti’s population cannot read and write efficiently. I think if we resolve these issues, we could hope to improve the presence of Haitian Creole in the computer world.</span></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><b>@pikglas:</b> I</span> can see Haitian Creole as being more popular in the next 10 years. Now google has added it to its list of languages in its linguistic tools, you saw us (Haitians) using it on twitter and create a hashtag where a lot of non-creole speakers was asking about it, what it is, and how they can try to understand it. I think these are some of the good signs which will lead the language to be more recognizable. [I will contribute by] using Haitian Creole more throughout the Internet world. As you can see, I do it via twitter and other websites like facebook and tumblr, and I will continue to do it, and I will suggest people try to learn it, I've done so with a friend of mine, and I will continue to do it, mostly via the computer world.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>@carelpedre:</b> I hope that every Haitian will be proud to speak Creole, that Creole will be the business language. I hope that somehow the Haitian diaspora will use creole as the main language in the world as the Spanish never let the language down even if they are living in the USA, an English-speaking country. [As for myself] I can promote the language. Let the world know how beautiful this language is. I'm up to anything to promote my culture, my country, my language.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">JCP: Anything else you'd like to say?</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>@twitjako:</b> <span>My comment about the use of Haitian Creole in Haiti and abroad is simple… Any language could not exist without people… If the Haitian people speak and write in Creole, the use of Haitian Creole could be really efficient, [even though] it’s not the case at the moment, but we've gotten strong signals with <a href="http://google.ht/" target="_blank">google.ht</a>, the Mozila project to translate its browser into Creole, the [spellchecker] <a href="http://kok.logipam.org/" target="_blank">kok.logipam.org</a>, and<span> </span>surely the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/" target="_blank">http://indigenoustweets.com</a> .. BRAVO!!</span></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>@pikglas:</b> I think the use of Haitian creole in Haiti and abroad is good. Me personally I would like to see people use it more. And when they are trying to get a non-Creole speaker to learn it, I would like us to stop teaching them profanity first, like we often do abroad, we can always start with the basics.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
<b>@carelpedre:</b> All I can say is that Haitian Creole is neglected. In Haiti it's considered as the language of the mass, the poor and those who didn't go to school. Abroad when you speak Creole it's like you miss something. We Haitians need to let the world know that our language is like theirs. We have to speak Creole as often as a Cuban speaks Spanish and be proud of it.<br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </div>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-1016763564620132712011-05-18T14:43:00.000-07:002011-05-18T18:09:17.029-07:00After the Quake: Jean Came Poulard on Haitian Creole<i> Our second interview in this series looks at the Haitian Creole language (Kreyòl Ayisyen), which is spoken by more than 10 million people around the world. Most, of course, live in Haiti, but there are also substantial speaker communities in the Dominican Republic, Canada and the US (in New York and South Florida especially), and in several other countries as well. Haitian Creole is something of an exceptional case on the Indigenous Tweets web site, as it does not fit any known definition of "indigenous", having its roots in the colonial language of French going back to the 18th century. Nevertheless, the language fits well with our mission, as it is facing many of the same obstacles as indigenous and minority languages in other parts of the world, competing as it does with standard French as the language of education, literature, and computing in Haiti. It does have some legal status, being an official language of Haiti since 1987, and being taught in primary and secondary schools in the country.</i><br />
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<i> For almost two years I have been working with the company <a href="http://logipam.org/">Logipam</a> in Haiti, helping to develop and promote open source software and resources for Haitian Creole. The massive earthquake that devastated the country on January 12, 2010 disrupted this work for time, but over the last year Logipam has returned to work with renewed energy and dedication. Below is a picture of the Logipam team; from left to right, Jean Came Poulard (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/jcpoulard">@jcpoulard</a>), Monstapha Hilaire (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/pwal2k_rot">@pwal2k_rot</a>), Eder Hilaire (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/kannkale">@kannkale</a>), Metuschael Prosper, Erick Toussaint (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/rickytweetht">@rickytweetht</a>), Emile Poulard (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/pouledge">@pouledge</a>), and Jean Baptiste Marc (<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/metminwi">@metminwi</a>). Jean Came Poulard is an IT Manager at <a href="http://uhelp.net/">HELP</a> and the Developer Manager of Logipam; he spoke with me about the current state of Haitian Creole and his work with Logipam.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Team Logipam</td></tr>
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>What opportunities are there to use Haitian Creole online? Is internet connectivity or<br />
access to computers an issue for your community? What kinds of software and web sites are there in the language?</i><br />
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<b>JCP:</b> As Haitian Creole is spoken by all the citizen of Haiti, Haitian Creole websites and social media in this language can be considered as an element of inclusion for the population. This inclusion will create a new era in some domains such as E-Learning, E-commerce, etc.<br />
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Internet connectivity remains a serious issue in Haiti -- it is poor and very expensive (US $60 per month for 256 Kb/s). One hour of connectivity in a CyberCafe costs one US dollar. The majority of social media users post messages from their phones as smart phones become more and more popular, costing US $25 a month for smart phones.<br />
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In late September 2009, the Logipam team started work on an open source Haitian Creole Spell Checker, with your help. One month later, we had released the first version of the spell checker (named "<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/haitian-creole-spell-checker/">Korektè òtograf kreyòl (KòK)</a>"), compatible with <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.mozillamessaging.com/thunderbird/">Thunderbird</a> and <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/">OpenOffice</a>/<a href="http://www.libreoffice.org/">LibreOffice</a>. Now the Logipam team is localizing Firefox using <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Localizing_with_Narro">Narro</a> and 36% of the work is already done.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPe3tQO-riWzzdhD7ONR7K-YitBxz5CfOOEUM7640ZpIStvlB-Vj9Ulse54OTDjxQIvV2FsavC8XVAhcmjjvFP-3U0bprfwuMgW0vboRGeDkgIGO3-E7lCoKSL9onRAirWR1QXQBzzig/s1600/IMG_0003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPe3tQO-riWzzdhD7ONR7K-YitBxz5CfOOEUM7640ZpIStvlB-Vj9Ulse54OTDjxQIvV2FsavC8XVAhcmjjvFP-3U0bprfwuMgW0vboRGeDkgIGO3-E7lCoKSL9onRAirWR1QXQBzzig/s320/IMG_0003.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Organizing editing work for the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/haitian-creole-spell-checker/">KòK</a> spell checker</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>KPS:</b> <i>I know many readers of this blog who speak other languages will be interested in translating programs like Firefox. You mentioned Narro, which is a web site that allows you to translate Firefox in your browser; nothing to download or install, just register and start translating. What are your impressions of it?</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>JCP:</b> It's great, a really good tool. A slow connection can sometimes be a problem, but otherwise we can translate just as fast as with offline tools. <br />
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<b>KPS:</b> <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online because they don't know computing terminology, or they don't have good keyboards, or they are simply more comfortable in a language like English or French. What is the general attitude toward using Haitian Creole online?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JCP:</b> The Haitian Creole speakers have similar issues to the ones listed above given that many computer users have learned to use computers in English or in French. With that comes the problem of Creole computing terminology. Nevertheless many signs show that the use of Haitian Creole online is increasing. For example, the Indigenous Tweets site proves just how many Tweeter account holders use Haitian Creole on the platform. Many other blogs, forums, mailing lists have plenty of Haitian Creole messages.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-PUpsymKBVpWrzk2k3eoBbBCZk_nAbxCTPKS3OGDFXrR-UiHyp0p7ixl1uJxaTDN2sGygaKpE4Z7ymptkupJgn55P5MyY2R1OBb5wyPbr7dD1YD2dFyJZy8AAkYEj2bUwemRLNYw20A/s1600/Picture+111.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-PUpsymKBVpWrzk2k3eoBbBCZk_nAbxCTPKS3OGDFXrR-UiHyp0p7ixl1uJxaTDN2sGygaKpE4Z7ymptkupJgn55P5MyY2R1OBb5wyPbr7dD1YD2dFyJZy8AAkYEj2bUwemRLNYw20A/s320/Picture+111.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The language in official use</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>KPS:</b> <i>I mentioned above that many indigenous languages lack computing terminology. Is this an issue for your language? How is/was terminology developed? Is there a "language board" or are terms developed naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they communicated to the community?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JCP:</b> Creole computing terminology is an issue that can be resolved given that a large majority of Creole scientific terminology is derived from French or/and English. For instance, people currently use either “Prent” or “Enprime” to say “Print”. The first one comes from the English word “print” and the second from French “Imprimer”.<br />
<br />
The Haitian Constitution recognizes a Haitian Creole Academy which must, as the French Academy, monitor and regulate the language; but this institution never concretely came to life. Therefore, the terms continue to be developed naturally by the users. The chaos is such that computer classes are taught in Creole with French books supported by English computer software.<br />
<br />
<b>KPS:</b> <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online? For example - differences in dialects, different spelling systems, problem with fonts, lack of computing expertise in the community, lack of interest from software vendors like Microsoft/Apple/Google.</i><br />
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<b>JCP:</b> In general, there are few scientific productions in Haitian Creole. In the technology field the main challenges for Haitian Creole are both a lack of computing expertise and a lack of interest from major software vendors in Haiti and abroad. Logipam strongly believes that Open Source can be an alternative to this situation. So far as I know, Logipam, which has a very small team (less than 5 active people), is the only institution that has an interest in localizing Open Source Software in Haiti. Big vendors such as Microsoft or Apple, even if they are relatively well represented in Haiti, don't really show interest in developing solutions in Haitian Creole. Google is the only one that has published two solutions in Haitian Creole: a search website and the Google Translator, but as of today no spell checkers are available for Microsoft or Google Chromium.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaq1Z_1oT0wtgg7JUXd_BT7EEtXcJril0kHR4fcZiUootq2cydwyCL-24fAO_AJ78Q88kR0Qm5DQgzY_RHsXcxM2fb9EZYjegmI0rG8Mt6X-obt6DM-7gLIZq4UU7mEhpH-Tr-mwbqGQ/s1600/P1070438.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaq1Z_1oT0wtgg7JUXd_BT7EEtXcJril0kHR4fcZiUootq2cydwyCL-24fAO_AJ78Q88kR0Qm5DQgzY_RHsXcxM2fb9EZYjegmI0rG8Mt6X-obt6DM-7gLIZq4UU7mEhpH-Tr-mwbqGQ/s320/P1070438.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ocean view in Haiti, near the town of Jeremie</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>KPS:</b> <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like<br />
facebook and twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JCP:</b> The majority of Internet users in Haiti are young people. Facebook has a lot of comments and messages in Haitian Creole. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Haitian connection, Sakapfet give a solid push to the use of Haitian Creole online. With at least 500,000 people using Twitter in Haiti, social media really enhances the presence of Haitian Creole online.<br />
<br />
<b>KPS:</b> <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JCP:</b> A vision in ten years! This is a very difficult question for me to answer considering a long list of unknown parameters I would have to deal with. But I really would like to see greater implementation of Haitian Creole in the education system in Haiti; and also see more publications in Creole in the scientific arena, as we are starting to see in literature. As a matter of fact, more books have been edited lately (even classic translations) in Haitian Creole. Moreover, a daily newspaper in Haitian Creole would be great boost to the language. In term of software, my team and I would like to see an operating system such as Ubuntu entirely translated in Haitian Creole. Our aim is to work to make that happen.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-82344282403072077912011-05-01T05:30:00.000-07:002011-05-01T05:30:02.210-07:00Not dead yet: John Gillingham on the Cornish Language<i> This is the first in a series of interviews with speakers of indigenous and minority languages who are involved in language revitalization efforts and who use their languages online.</i><br />
<br />
<i> I am excited to begin the series with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language">Cornish language</a> (Kernewek), one of the six Celtic languages, spoken in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornwall">Cornwall</a>, at the southwestern-most tip of Great Britain. Cornish is a particularly interesting case since it is among the languages to have been declared "dead" as far back as the 18th century, one of the first victims of the expansion of English that is threatening so many languages around the world to this day. However, the reports of the death of Cornish have been greatly exaggerated! Indeed, it is in many ways an inspiring case of language revival; today it is spoken by an active community of second-language learners and a number of children are being raised in the language, with the first Cornish language preschool opening just last year.</i><br />
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<i>The language is also famous for a decades-long dispute over orthography that has hindered the revival movement in many ways; we touch on some of those issues in the interview below. The good news is that in 2008 many of the major figures in the language community came to an agreement on a <a href="http://www.benjaminbruch.com/docs/papers/Outline_of_the_SWF.pdf">Standard Written Form</a> (PDF link) for Cornish. For other small language communities who are trying to produce written materials for language revitalization and are struggling with dialect variations or spellings differences, there are certainly important lessons to be learned from the Cornish experience.</i><br />
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</i><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkct9QplsnzPr3KGO9GYhSmqlicl2BdwkhW1eiOCt9BTpjdj_wvVJyXIjJRgoPSefdjV3W5HanHWfflrJiYlDtlba1j6zJ_yuApTiwG4zmGKNsllei5Z3re6eASJw-rZWTu7pzWSkGQ/s1600/Picture+9.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkct9QplsnzPr3KGO9GYhSmqlicl2BdwkhW1eiOCt9BTpjdj_wvVJyXIjJRgoPSefdjV3W5HanHWfflrJiYlDtlba1j6zJ_yuApTiwG4zmGKNsllei5Z3re6eASJw-rZWTu7pzWSkGQ/s1600/Picture+9.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Gillingham, @Bodrugan</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i>John Ellery Gillingham</i> <i>is a student of Cornish Studies at the <a href="http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/">University of Exeter's Cornwall campus</a>, Tremough,</i> <i>studying the decline of the language during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. He has been learning Cornish since his teen years, and is trying to learn as many words orally from traditional speakers, or their families, as possible. He is also active in the Cornish language community on Twitter (indeed, currently ranked number one on the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kw/">Indigenous Tweets page for Cornish</a>), as <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/Bodrugan">@Bodrugan</a>. I spoke with him about the current state of the language, both online and offline.</i><br />
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<b>KPS</b>: <i>Can you give us a quick overview of the state of the language, for readers who may not be familiar with Cornish? How many speakers are there? Does it have any official status, and is it taught in schools?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JEG</b>: There hasn't been any real census of the number and quality of speakers out there, but there are maybe a couple of dozen young people raised in the language, and around 200 fluent. There are also around 2000 people with a conversational level of Cornish. I feel that the numbers are increasing. Cornish was given protection under the <a href="http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/html/148.htm">European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages</a> by the UK government in 2001 and has been receiving a limited amount of public funding in recent years. It has been taught in schools for a number of years now and the number of such classes is increasing. There have been Cornish language playgroups for preschool children over recent decades and there is now, since 2010, a Cornish language creche, <a href="http://movyansskolyowmeythrin.yolasite.com/">Skol Veythrin Karenza</a>, which not only teaches the children, but also teaches the parents how to use Cornish around the home. At the moment there are no schools using Cornish to teach. <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUNtA-OFNV637zSVQFCaT4aQ_y_64gRndFmWRBVya5mftHLvzuv5yCp3x_NR4f5Sk2vnd5ZGofrky53Zk6j2OLqrgDdlDasz0-kV2ks5TdFAtPtbYKxf8K7M4rBHzoRZ9O6R4P3nf5NQ/s1600/Picture+4.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUNtA-OFNV637zSVQFCaT4aQ_y_64gRndFmWRBVya5mftHLvzuv5yCp3x_NR4f5Sk2vnd5ZGofrky53Zk6j2OLqrgDdlDasz0-kV2ks5TdFAtPtbYKxf8K7M4rBHzoRZ9O6R4P3nf5NQ/s320/Picture+4.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%AAn-an-Tol">Men an Tol</a>, an ancient stone structure in W. Cornwall</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>What opportunities are there to use the language online? Are there websites (Facebook, Google search, Wikipedia) translated into your language? What about software and other resources (web browsers, office software, online dictionaries, spell checkers)?</i><br />
<br />
<b>JEG</b>: The internet is no problem, we had broadband rolled out across Cornwall very early on, and now we are having high speed broadband installed. There have been projects to translate things into Cornish but I don't really use them [e.g. translations of <a href="https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+lang/kw">Ubuntu Linux</a> and the digital music manager <a href="http://www.getsongbird.com/">Songbird</a>]. Some of <a href="http://kw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennfolen">Wikipedia</a> has been translated but people have been reluctant to do too much while there is uncertainty over the spelling system used for the language. A <a href="http://www.magakernow.org.uk/">new spelling system</a> has recently been devised after decades of infighting over how to spell Cornish. The divisions led to a lot of people refusing or otherwise reluctant to converse with each other either in public or on the internet. There is a regular radio podcast available on the internet called <a href="http://radyo.kernewegva.com/index.html">Radyo an Gernewegva</a> and also weekly news in Cornish on local radio.<br />
<div class="im"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEVWyYJDez8703I1Ns0J8UATa__iw_4mgK4Wnc7zd6rrkQ9v-8Fw7t1U_IbIYTiISQNKJtvlj_njeFWzIzzPOWMvTLzrHWwWwBhOQzubYvpZXUjpSwghOdh7U9AcA020gphj_MkKuPpw/s1600/Picture+6.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEVWyYJDez8703I1Ns0J8UATa__iw_4mgK4Wnc7zd6rrkQ9v-8Fw7t1U_IbIYTiISQNKJtvlj_njeFWzIzzPOWMvTLzrHWwWwBhOQzubYvpZXUjpSwghOdh7U9AcA020gphj_MkKuPpw/s320/Picture+6.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Procession in honor of St. Piran, with the national flag of Cornwall</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="im"><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>Many speakers of indigenous and minority languages are reluctant to use their languages online because of difficulties with terminology, orthography, keyboard input, etc., or simply because they are more comfortable with English/French/Spanish. Are any of these issues relevant for speakers of your language? What is the general attitude toward using the language online?</i></div><br />
<b>JEG</b>: One thing is people not being confident with the new standard spelling system, there were four or five different spelling systems before, so people will often write in English to avoid any such problems. A lot of people just learn to use the computer in English but that is a different thing entirely to getting people to write in the language on-line.<br />
<div class="im"><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>Many indigenous and minority languages lack computing terminology. Is this an issue for your language? How is/was terminology developed? Is there a "language board" or are terms developed naturally by the community? If there are official terms, how are they communicated to the community?</i></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggWHuI8q9gtlr_9K-CyN45KZmIJV_PfFH6emyaKHOcUq2Msxhyl0SnHYyLUz8oShKRA5RR7unEsSEj99NLcgYdwaRmQd-jmrhSfRLaxKPMFoufI69AxxtONgmjsCr0J6K1uiiVbSq8ww/s1600/Picture+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggWHuI8q9gtlr_9K-CyN45KZmIJV_PfFH6emyaKHOcUq2Msxhyl0SnHYyLUz8oShKRA5RR7unEsSEj99NLcgYdwaRmQd-jmrhSfRLaxKPMFoufI69AxxtONgmjsCr0J6K1uiiVbSq8ww/s320/Picture+2.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolenowe">Bolenowe</a>, where John lives</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<b>JEG</b>: There has definitely been a movement from the younger part of the language community to keep Cornish up to date with modern technology. There are various language organisations publishing new material and keeping the language in the present. 'Official' new words are disseminated through books, dictionaries and magazines as well as on radio. <br />
<div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"><br />
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<b>KPS: </b><i>Why multiple organisations? Are the different organisations in charge of different terminology domains, or is it more of a free-for-all?</i></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"><br />
<b>JEG: </b><i> </i>The different organisations are as a result of the arguments over spelling systems. I expect that the <a href="http://www.magakernow.org.uk/default.aspx?lang=en-gb">Cornish Language Partnership</a> would publish them if they had the time. They are the official, government funded organisation. [Other organisations include:] </div><div class="im"><ul><li><a href="http://www.agantavas.com/" target="_blank" title="Link to Agan Tavas website. Opens in a new window.">Agan Tavas - Our Language</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.cornishlanguage.org.uk/" target="_blank" title="Link to Cussel website. Opens in a new window.">Cussel an Tavaz Kernuak - Cornish Language Council</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_277109117">Kesva an Taves Kernewek<b></b> - Cornish Language Board</a><a href="http://www.kesva.org/" target="_blank" title="Link to Kesva website. Opens in a new window."> </a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.cornish-language.org/" target="_blank" title="Link to Kowethas website. Opens in a new window.">Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek Warlinenn - Cornish Language Fellowship online </a></li>
</ul></div><div class="im">And yes it is a bit of a free for all, but in the end, to be accepted, they have to be used by the language community. If the words pertain to your profession or field of interest then it is likely that you are going to come up with them and use them.</div><div class="im"><b> </b></div><div class="im"></div><div class="im"><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>Are there other special challenges your community faces in terms of developing technology for the language and/or communicating online?</i></div><div class="im"><br />
</div><b>JEG</b>: Hopefully the problems to do with spelling systems will reduce in the coming few years. There are a great many older members of the language community and it is unlikely that many of them will get involved in using Cornish on social media, but there are some who certainly do use it.<br />
<div class="im"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9yLjqvC0oYvzqajmFM624rTC2fGuOSTYZcKomA_JWw90FfgRFYEtFjRCGMJYnXmL3Km232zmtMogbDFANBJSyjQDfOhc-WICmi6G0LsOipagfmZnA4chmqj9KAR6iy7oovoo-lnXx5Q/s1600/Picture+7.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9yLjqvC0oYvzqajmFM624rTC2fGuOSTYZcKomA_JWw90FfgRFYEtFjRCGMJYnXmL3Km232zmtMogbDFANBJSyjQDfOhc-WICmi6G0LsOipagfmZnA4chmqj9KAR6iy7oovoo-lnXx5Q/s320/Picture+7.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">18th century Cornish inscription found in one of John's books</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="im"><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>Are young people using the language online? Do you think social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are helping encourage language use by younger speakers?</i></div><br />
<b>JEG</b>: Yes, and I think things like Indigenous Tweets are helping with that. I think that there has been a problem in the past where young speakers have been very much isolated from each other and have therefore reverted to using English on a daily basis with no Cornish.<br />
<div class="im"></div><div class="im"><br />
<b>KPS</b>: <i>What is your vision for your language in ten years, both in general terms and in terms of software/online use?</i></div><br />
<b>JEG</b>: In general I want schools to begin teaching in the language, and every school to run Cornish classes. I would like to see an on-line news service in Cornish, and Cornish television (even if it's just on the internet).Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-20482971961736074272011-04-25T13:03:00.000-07:002011-04-25T13:03:43.256-07:00Interviews coming soon! When I created this blog to go along with the Indigenous Tweets site, the idea was to share ideas about using and promoting our languages online. One way I'm planning on doing this is by talking with people from different communities who are developing language technology, translating software or web sites, or using social media to revitalize their language. A number of people have agreed to do this and I hope the first interview will be posted in the next few days!<br />
<br />
In the meantime, here are a few more site updates. I've added eleven new languages since the last blog post, bringing the total to 82. Here are the new ones:<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/an/">Aragonés</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kbd/">Адыгэбзэ/Circassian (Adyghe)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/eml/">Emiliàn e Rumagnòl</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/pam/">Kapampangan</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/del/">Lenape/Delaware </a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/lmo/">Lombard</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/new/">नेपाल भाषा/Newar</a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/saz/"><span style="font-size: small;">ꢱꣃꢬꢵꢰ꣄ꢜ꣄ꢬꢵ/Saurashtra</span></a></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/vif/">TshiVili/Vili </a></span></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/mxv/"><span style="font-size: small;">Tu'un Sávi/Mixteco</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/yi/">ייִדיש/Yiddish</a><span style="font-size: small;"></span></li>
</ul> I also did a few video interviews about the site last week - I was on the Al Jazeera program "<a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14141191">The Stream</a>", the <a href="http://vimeo.com/22716275">Brian Lehrer Show</a>, and "Ciencia Salud Y Tecnología" on NTN24 (video link coming). To keep up with the latest news, be sure to follow us on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/IndigenousTweet">@IndigenousTweet</a>.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-18395363667470789462011-04-08T11:09:00.000-07:002011-04-08T11:09:58.691-07:00Some Milestones We've reached some milestones in the last week. First, I've added 17 new languages to the site since the last update, so there are now 71 supported languages in all, more than twice the number we started with three weeks ago. Again Michael Bauer helped with several of these, and I also had a number of people write to me after the BBC interview asking if I would support their language. Here's the full list of new languages:<br />
<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ain/">Ainu</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/bem/">Bemba</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/luo/">Dholuo/Luo </a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/zap/">Diidxazá/Zapotec</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kld/">Gamilaraay</a></li>
<li> <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/cak/">Kaqchikel</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/lkt/">Lakȟótiyapi/Lakota</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/lg/">Luganda</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/arn/">Mapudungun</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ppl/">Nawat/Pipil</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/oc/">Occitan</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/pau/">Palauan</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/tsz/">P'urhépecha</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/rom/">Romani</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/quc/">Qatzijob'al/K'iche'</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/sn/">Shona</a></li>
<li><a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ti/">Tigrigna</a></li>
</ul><br />
Among these are our first indigenous Australian language (Gamilaraay, with 3 speakers according to <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/">Ethnologue</a>) and two other critically endangered languages: Ainu (~15 speakers in Japan), and Nawat (~20 speakers, all older). Thanks to <a href="http://alanrking.info/nawatlanguage.php">Alan R. King</a> who provided training data for Nawat and who is responsible for the first couple of tweets in that language.<br />
<br />
We also have a number of new translations. The first round of translations came mostly from friends working on the Firefox localization teams. Many of these new translations are directly from members of supported language communities on Twitter: Rumantsch (Gion-Andri Cantieni, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/gionandri">@gionandri</a>), Setswana (Sternly Simon, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/talk2ras">@talk2ras</a>), Kɨlaangi (Oliver Stegen, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/babatabita">@babatabita</a>), Occitan (Maxime Caillon, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/caillonm">@caillonm</a>), Kernewek/Cornish (John Gillingham, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/Bodrugan">@Bodrugan</a>), Brezhoneg/Breton (Ahmed Razoui, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/duzodu">@duzodu</a>), and Nawat/Pipil (Alan R. King, <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/alanrking">@alanrking</a>). We also have a translation into Marshallese from Marco Mora, but no tweets in that language yet!<br />
<br />
One additional milestone. The site is generated by using a program that "crawls" Twitter users, grabbing the tweets on their timeline and performing statistical language recognition on those tweets (details to come). Then, if a given user has more than a certain fraction of their tweets in the target language, that user's followers are added to a queue to be checked in the same way. In the last couple of days, the initial crawls for Basque and Welsh were completed, meaning all languages, with the exception of Haitian Creole, are now complete. Therefore the number of users currently listed for each language should represent a good initial estimate of the total user base on Twitter. Of course the program will continue to add new users as they are discovered by the crawler (through random search queries for words in each language) and as they are suggested via the form on each language page on <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/">IndigenousTweets.com</a>.<br />
<br />
Haitian Creole is a special case and will remain so. As noted in an earlier post, we expect there are at least 100,000 people tweeting in Creole and it is unlikely I can keep up with all of them given the limits imposed by Twitter, but I will do my best.<br />
<br />
Next milestone: 100 languages!Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-42621260021158638802011-04-05T14:26:00.000-07:002011-04-05T14:26:36.469-07:00Interview on BBC World Service Last week I recorded an interview with Gareth Mitchell who presents the BBC World Service's radio show "Click" (and who I discovered to be a Welsh speaker during the interview). That show aired earlier today and is available now as a podcast from the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fvkxf">BBC web site</a>.<br />
<br />
There have also been several newspaper articles and blog posts about Indigenous Tweets over the last couple of weeks; I'm really happy about all the attention the site's been getting, particularly the interest that's been shown by the indigenous language communities it's meant to serve - thanks everyone!<br />
<br />
In particular, here's an <a href="http://www.haaretz.co.il/captain/spages/1222723.html">article in Hebrew</a> by Oded Yaron from the Haaretz newspaper, <a href="http://ijnet.org/ru/blog/92420">one in Russian</a> by<span class="submitted"><span><span class="username"> Yuliya Melnyk, and a <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/using_twitter_to_preserve_minority_languages.php">piece in English</a> by Curt Hopkins from Read Write Web that appeared the day after the launch and drew a huge number of people to the site. I'll link to some of the blogs in a separate post next chance I get.</span></span></span>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-68816477331264814012011-03-24T14:20:00.000-07:002011-03-24T14:20:39.220-07:0015 more languages Thanks to the expert help of <a href="http://www.akerbeltz.org/">Michael Bauer (akerbeltz)</a>, Indigenous Tweets now supports 54 languages! Michael combined his broad knowledge of indigenous and minority languages with many hours of searching on Twitter (even burning through his daily quota of searches on the web site), and was able to find users tweeting in the following languages: <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kl/">Kalaallisut/Greenlandic</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ty/">Tahitian</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/bi/">Bislama</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/sc/">Sardinian</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/co/">Corsican</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ay/">Aymara</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/chr/">ᏣᎳᎩ/Cherokee</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kab/">Kabyle</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/rm/">Rumantsch</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/to/">Tongan</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ee/">Eʋegbe/Ewe</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/mic/">Míkmaq/Micmac</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/wa/">Walon</a>, <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ast/">Asturian</a>, and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/yua/">Yucatán Maya</a>. I used his suggestions as starting points for the crawler and have turned up additional users in many cases.<br />
<br />
I welcome contributions of this kind in the comments. Just give the language name (in English and in the language itself if you know it), the <a href="http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp">ISO 639-3 code</a>, and a list of Twitter usernames and I will add them to the site.<br />
<br />
Go raibh míle maith agat a Mhíchíl!Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-64839872366886680432011-03-21T14:55:00.000-07:002011-03-21T14:55:50.272-07:00How many languages are out there? I added two more languages over the weekend: <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/iu/">Inuktitut/ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ</a>, thanks to some prompting from <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/timpasch">Tim Pasch</a>, and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/lag/">Rangi/Kɨlaangi</a> thanks to <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/babatabita">Oliver Stegen</a> who did what we think are the first tweets in that language. As the site is set up now, it will only detect Inuktitut tweets written using syllabics, although if I have time I may extend it to find examples in Latin script as well.<br />
<br />
Two more language pages were translated over the weekend also: <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/ny/">Chichewa</a>, thanks to Edmond Kachale (who was kind enough to <a href="http://edceekays.blogspot.com/2011/03/indigenous-tweets-fun-side-of-tweeting.html">blog about us</a> too), and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/cy/">Welsh</a>, thanks to Carl Morris, Rhys Wynne, and Gareth Jones.<br />
<br />
Just how many languages are out there on Twitter? This is a question I've been exploring for many years in the broader context of the web, where my <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/index.html">Crúbadán web crawler</a> has found documents written in almost <a href="http://borel.slu.edu/crubadan/stadas.html">500 languages</a>. Those texts are used to train the language recognition algorithms that drive IndigenousTweets.com (I'm planning a blog post on the details of the language recognition). I could conceivably add any of these 500 languages to IndigenousTweets, with the following restrictions:<br />
<br />
<ol><li>Twitter limits the number of queries I can make to their API so I don't plan on adding any languages with Twitter communities that are any more active than the top languages I have now: Haitian Creole, Basque and Welsh. It's even unlikely I can get everything in Creole; my friend <a href="http://logipam.org/">Jean Came Poulard</a> conjectures there may be at least a half a million people tweeting in the language.</li>
<li>My language recognition algorithms work well at the level of full documents, but things are more challenging when working with tweets of 140 characters or less, and which often contain URLs, abbreviations, etc. So many languages that I'd like to include are turning out to be very challenging, for example distinguishing the Filipino languages Cebuano, Tagalog, and Hiligaynon.</li>
<li>Finally, my guess is that there is no one using Twitter in the vast majority of the other 400+ languages, at least not yet. I should mention that I've set up IndigenousTweets for several other languages and made a non-trivial attempt at finding tweeters, with no luck: Aymara, Bislama, Kashubian, Marshallese, Pohnpeian, Sango, and Songhay.</li>
</ol><br />
Please keep the suggestions for new languages coming, and if you can point me to one or two people you know are tweeting in the language, that's a big help.Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6848882470329418857.post-5452008710388728412011-03-19T09:40:00.000-07:002011-03-19T09:40:03.239-07:00New Languages! Yesterday, I added <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/kw/">Kernewek (Cornish)</a> and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/se/">Sámegiella (Sámi)</a> to Indigenous Tweets, and was happy to see there are at least 27 people tweeting in Kernewek. <br />
<br />
I also added translations of the <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/eu/">Basque</a> and <a href="http://indigenoustweets.com/wo/">Wolof</a> pages, thanks to Julen Ruiz Aizpuru and El Hadji Beye for those. I'd like all of the pages to be translated eventually; please get in touch if you're willing to help with that. There are just 13 short strings to translate into each language:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul><li>Trending:</li>
<li>Anyone missing?</li>
<li>Twitter username:</li>
<li>Submit</li>
<li>User</li>
<li>Total</li>
<li>Followers</li>
<li>Following</li>
<li>Last Tweet</li>
<li>Thanks!</li>
<li>Invalid name.</li>
<li>Tell the world you're here:</li>
<li>I'm a top tweeter in my language!</li>
</ul>Kevin Scannellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11102683404376963361noreply@blogger.com24