We've all heard of the popular site Twitter and "tweeting". But what about IndigenousTweets.com? This website is promotes communication, just like Twitter, but promotes communication in minority or endangered languages. It aims to prevent dying languages from going extinct by establishing which Twitter users embrace their "mother tongue" most often and then helps those speakers communicate and get in contact with one another. The site says which languages are being tweeted in across the globe and how many people are tweeting in that language. The list starts with Kreyòl ayisyen, spoken by some 12 million people, mostly in Haiti, and goes through 68 languages all the way to an almost extinct language in New South Wales, Australia known as Gamilaaray. According to IndigenousTweets.com, only one user tweets in the lesser known Gamilaaray.
But more common languages are also going strong on Twitter. "I was shocked that there are almost 1000 people tweeting in Irish", says Kevin Scannell, a professor of Computer Science at St. Louis University and founder of the site. "There are just over 3000 people tweeting in Basque. The numbers keep growing." The site aims to connect these people together, but it also aims to keep minority languages alive. While modern technology is blamed for "homogenizing our ever shrinking world", sites that encourage such diversity and link minority language speakers together have the potential to change that.
But what are your opinions on this? Should we encourage the maintenance of dying or minority languages? What are the advantages or disadvantages of having a linguistically diverse global community? Wikipedia lists 82 languages under the headline "recently extinct" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language) , and The Guardian claims that "Half of living languages face extinction" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/21/endangered-languages-research-project). But with 6,500 living languages currently being used around the world today, what does it matter to us if nobody speaks Akkala Sami or Modern Gutnish anymore?
13 comments:
I think that the site is doing a great job at trying to keep dying languages alive and helping them to continue to thrive. It's sad how many languages are becoming extinct in the world; with the loss of languages come a loss of culture and heritage, at least for a certain group of individuals. By letting people tweet and connect in different languages, I think that this can help bystanders or those that are not familiar with a certain language to learn of it and possibly familiarize themselves with different languages of the world.
However, with the really uncommon and almost extinct languages, it's kind of unnecessary to make sure that they don't disappear, but I don't think that their existence hurts anyone. I do think that those communicating in these languages should learn other, more commonly used languages in order to be able to communicate in the case that the language does become extinct, but its existence does no harm.
Sure, it's a loss of culture and heritage, but who cares? We need to start acting as a global community if we want to solve the problems of our era. The three remaining languages in the world that will not go extinct are English, Chinese, and Spanish, and I am not disappointed by that. This "Indigenous Tweets" project is just undoing the progress real twitter has made. It's pretty obvious to me that few languages are better than many. What's the big deal if we lose some of the concepts and ways of thinking that other languages use? What's the point of passing down secrets and solutions of a culture through language if they can't speak English or Chinese? I don't see how...
http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector#p/u/10/tFX68SJs2-0
oh...
I think that it is very good that this website is saving foreign languages. I think that we should encourage dying languages because these languages contains its on special things. But I think we should also have a language we must all learn so that all people can be able to communicate with each other (yes I know this is really hard to do). I think it is important in having a linguistically diverse community because I think a mix of cultures is good. Each special culture brings their own unique thing which positively effects our community.
I believe that it's great that Twitter has set up this program to allow those who speak rare languages to communicate with one another. Even though these rarer languages may not mean as much in a business setting, culturally they can help us learn much more about the way humans interact with one another. As was commented previously, keeping these dying languages alive, for even a little longer, adds much more to the diversity of the world and to the chance that there is some idea that can change society for the better hidden in the language.
When I read this, I thought of the video "The Shaman's Apprentice" that we watched in biotech. It was about how cultures living in the rainforest would use plants to make medecines that western medecine couldn't produce. As rainforests are being cut down, we are losing that knowledge and that culture. I feel like it is the same with languages. Their cultures could be important and provide knowledge that we aren't even aware of. This sight sounds like a great project. Unfortunately, I am not convinced it will make it very far, but lets hope I'm wrong
I wholeheartedly agree with Alexander Phinney in this case. While many will make a big deal out of preserving culture and all these other chivalrous intentions, what they are really doing is slowing down process. As a social Darwinist, I believe that anything that has fallen out of use, or outlived its period of necessity has to go. In our time, English, Chinese, and Spanish are the main languages, and they will, as time goes on, eliminate the weaker languages. this is not a very fun thing to think about, but it must happen.
.... WOW THIS WEBSITE IS HELLA BOSS!
dont hate on this website... and i am REALLYYY just pissed off at these hater comments.
give me a second to collect my thoughts.. ... GAWWDDDD... afterprom hangover....
-Raymond Lim
To say that the world should be simplified to a few major languages is an overstatement...One's world is as big as the individual chooses it to be. For example, my world is as big as the greater bay area, and i find my happiness keeping it simple through that. Sure, my world might not have the answer to the meaning of life, but i am sure am happy that i keep life is simple. If you find your happiness in international politics... ok cool. do your thing. but if you're gonna call a global community a community.. our global differences make it "pretty darn disfunctional"
cough* jihad*
if the world was a family, we've been in a family feud since the crusades a thousand years ago. we got into a lot of big fights... then we gave each other space to calm down and do our own things for a couple hundred years, then when technology bloomed in the 20th century. we decided to come together again.. and here we are making our home a mess while we're trying to accept each other's differences so we can all just get along finally. Culture Clash.
communication is a key to communities. yes, one language in a community makes it so much easier to share ideas...but if you want to share ideas across different communities.. don't be lazy and translate it. the language barriers help separate the globe into different communities. each with its own strengths and flaws..but this language barrier keeps them separate (which is not necessarily a bad thing). when you put two or more communities together...the strengths are shared but there's a tendency to focus on the flaws...
you know what's driving globalization? --> $$$. its called following the money. Because even the guy in Haiti that's speaking Gamilaaray has to earn a living so his family can eat....so he probably learns english so he can get a job in America. It's probably the same reason why you see so many asian-americans in the AP classes raising the bar and the grading curve...
to all those ambitious people out there: never forget that your family is your biggest asset, and in order to
understand your family, you better understand where you're family's been that includes the times when they were in the middle of no where in russia speaking there own dialect.. or in that little spot in great britain speaking Welsh (if i spelled it wrong, please correct me.)
bringing the world together is going to solve a whole lot of issues simply because there are more minds thinking on the same problem.but if all minds think alike.. well then bringing more minds together is pointless. --> diversity is good.
"we live in the same building, but we got different views" -drake
to impose that we should use only major cultures languages and stick to those cultures because you think that its better in whatever way you can think of... i don't know about a lot of you ppl, but to me, you're imposing one culture over another... which goes back to imperialism (spanish conquistadors), colonialism/westward expansion (native americans and U.S.) ... and fascism (hitler and jews).
I don't believe in social darwinism.. i thought we as humans were above that. Call me a socialist, but i have never believed that a man's worth is determined by the money in his pocket. Money can definitely control a man, cauz a person needs money to survive in today's world... but who gives anyone the right to abuse take away my livelihood. socialism became a bad thing after people tried to spread what i think was a good idea in a horrible way with party autocracy--> communism.
be proud of your culture, no matter how small it is. race doesn't get you anything (white, yellow, black, brown, purple*).. but your culture entitles you to your power..
(Chinese, Filipino, English, Welsh, Brazilian, Georgian, get the idea..)
if you don't believe me, look up:
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples
-Raymond Lim
The extinction of languages is wholly inevitable, no matter how sad that is to some people. Sure, the site may be trying to accomplish a "noble" thing, but there's just no point.
@ Raymond:
"i don't know about a lot of you ppl, but to me, you're imposing one culture over another... which goes back to imperialism (spanish conquistadors), colonialism/westward expansion (native americans and U.S.) ... and fascism (hitler and jews)."
That's a bit of a stretch eh? If you put it that way, you might as well eliminate all of humanity. All of history has people imposing one culture over another. Hell, if you want to put it in those terms, our Constitution is a representation of us imposing our culture on everyone.
"I don't believe in social darwinism.. i thought we as humans were above that"
Ehhh... Our entire society is based off of social darwinism.
In my AP Human Geography class that I took in sophomore year, we learned about a language called Esperanto. In the 19th century, Esperanto was developed by a Polish linguist named L.L. Zamenhof. Esperanto was a completely constructed language that picked up many of its characteristics from languages all over the world. Esperanto was designed to be the first "worldwide language"- a language that everyone could use to communicate with everyone else in the world. Sadly, Esperanto didn't catch on well, and it's considered a somewhat failed experiment.
Although I love how IndigenousTweets.com is trying to preserve the many, many different dialects of the world, the extinction of languages is invariably inevitable. This is just the way things are, and I'm not completely bummed out about that. In my perspective, the globalization of a common language (like Esperanto) is in fact desired. If more people speak more of the same language, the world would be a more interconnected place. Losing languages is unfortunate, but people don't need a language to preserve a culture or a way of life.
Although it's desirable to have one common language that everybody can speak, it doesn't mean that that one language has to come at the expense of all other languages. In my opinion, the maintenance of a diverse variety of languages is extremely crucial because language is the medium through which people think and through which ideas are developed. With the elimination of certain languages comes the elimination of a myriad of ideas. Every language has certain concepts and terms that don't really have equivalents in other languages, so the loss of certain languages results in the loss of certain concepts. If there were only a few languages in the world, and all the other languages died out, the human population as a whole would lose many ideas. The loss of languages and the consolidation of all communication into a few languages reminds me of how in George Orwell's book 1984, the characters work on cutting words out of the dictionary in order to limit the range of people's thoughts. The loss of languages will have a similar result as the idea that the book 1984 was getting at.
Thanks, Dan, for a sincere reply to a satirical comment. Your sincerity has duly proved my point.
@ ryan
Yes, extinction is inevitable, but to give up because it’s inevitable isn't.
I can agree that history it is what it is.
But to say that preserving a culture is pointless, it’s inevitable to not even try... that's too existential for me.
We should not think that it’s better to die now because we’re all going to die anyway. (Or not doing work cause were graduating)
its not about noble causes of charity, its about pride in one's culture. If that was my culture on that website, I’d sure wouldn’t sit and watch it disappear.
You gotta be from a minority background to better understand why such a blog website would exist.
-- > “I say a lot of you ppl” because, “a lot” of people tend to be the majority.
I don't see a benefit from throwing away a culture because the majority thinks its obsolete; give it a fighting chance. At some point China almost lost its culture when the western world tried to carve it up, then they went into civil war, and revolution and came back. Look where they are now.
“Hell, if you want to put it in those terms, our Constitution is a representation of us imposing our culture on everyone.”--> That’s why they added the bill of rights and constitutional amendments for civil rights. And those Native Americans fought us off for as long as they could before we claimed their land.
we took silton's class: there's something in that constitution about majority rule with minority rights. Well, the minorities didn't get there civil liberties protected until they fought for civil rights. Here, the door open for minorities a fighting chance from having a culture imposed on.
--> i didn't say social darwinism did not exist, i meant am advert to the idea of it...and well our society isn't exactly a perfect place to live.
-Raymond Lim
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