As I pointed out here and here, speakers of minority and endangered languages are using Web 2.0 social networking applications like Facebook as a means of interacting and communicating. Well , according to wakablogger, it seems Twitter, the short message site, is also being used by these communities as well. The problem is: how to find tweets that are in minority languages? A solution is now at hand, as wakablogger says:
“To address this issue, Kevin Scannell has set up Indigenous Tweets as a place to find people who tweet in your language. The home page shows the languages tracked—currently 39, up from the initial 35—as well as other information such as how many users tweet in each language and how many tweets have been sent out.
To use Indigenous Tweets, click on a language to see the top tweeters in that language (up to 500), then click on a tweeter to go to Twitter.com and see that person’s tweet feed. From there, you can sign up to the feed if interested. Both Twitter and Indigenous Tweets are free services.
As a companion to Indigenous Tweets, Scannell has set up a blog with the same name, Indigenous Tweets.”
Most of the languages listed on Indigenous Tweets, like Haitian Creole (which has over 2,200 users) and Yoruba, are not endangered, but some are, like Sámi and Breton.
I use the Tweetdeck desktop application to mashup my Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In feeds in one convenient place — from now on I’ll be keeping an eye out through Indigenous Tweets for languages I am interested in to add to my Twitter feed.
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I’ve started using the Twitter hashtag #endangered #languages in relevant tweets. A column in Tweetdeck with “#endangered #languages” as the search term brought up 4 tweets between April 6-10. “#endangered #languages” is a bit long for Twitter – maybe someone will think of something shorter…