Examining Minority Languages In New Media - Virtual Ethnography

Adeptus, 2019

Considering that social media is increasingly present in our daily communicative exchanges, digital presence is an essential component of language revitalization and maintenance. Online communication has modified our language use in various ways. In fact, language use online is often described as hybrid, and boundaries across languages tend to blur. These are also characteristics of translanguaging approaches, which see language as fluid codes of communication. “Breathing spaces” are needed in order to achieve “sustainable translanguaging” practices for minority languages. The establishment of communities of performing minority language speakers in a digital environment raises the question whether these emerging virtual communities can take up the role of breathing spaces for minority languages.

“...there will often be more minority language material produced on the internet than in traditional print or audio-visual forms” (UNESCO, 2004). It has been noted that the area surrounding the actual effects of new media on minority languages is largely under researched. This is potentially a difficult situation for minority languages and their activists as they struggle to formulate policy initiatives and guidelines for new media and online resources which they hope will have a guaranteed positive effect on a minority language. This project looks at the positive and negative effects new media have on minority languages and whether online is the ideal medium for minority language sustainability and revitalisation. The aim of this project is to investigate this relationship, outlining both the negative and positive effects new media bring to minority languages and their communities. Several sites which feature minority languages and which act as online resources for these languages are examined throughout this project. These sites include online initiatives such as The Google Endangered Language Project, social networking sites like Facebook, online resources such as teanglann.ie and tearma.ie, along with Apps such as Duolingo and Abairleat!. Initial findings appeared to undermine the original perception that new media are a safe-place for minority languages. This project found that new media can both benefit and threaten minority languages and their speakers’ communities. This project first discusses the positive and negative effects of new media on minority languages originally discussed by Cunliffe (2007) in relation to the sites mentioned above. The fourth chapter then goes on to discuss several of these effects in relation to the Irish language, along with several new effects which were observed in chapter three. These effects include: Connection Cost Status Appeal Freedom from Regulation Limitations

2014

Introduction In the past quarter of a century, things digital have changed numerous aspects of our lives – and language use is no exception. With the use of email, the world wide web, mobile technologies, and digitally mediated ways of communication, a new domain of language use has entered the lives of most of us – namely, what I call “digital language use” below. A lot of it is oral, mediated by mobile phones and voice-over-IP (like Skype, for instance), but a great part of it is written and involves both reading and writing (such as emailing, texting, instant messaging, blogging etc.). In fact, it is estimated that through the use of these ways of digital communication, we read and write more today than before their advent (Baron 2008: 183). This makes especially written forms of digitally mediated communication a highly important new aspect of language use that should be the focus of concern for sociolinguists, educators working in bilingual education, and, indeed, all professio...

International Interactions in Online Environments, 2012

2019

A minority language in the globalizing world: The Buryat language on the Internet The situation of languages on the Internet seems to reproduce their situation in offline reality: dominant languages with a large number of users and support from state and society are more widespread. This does not mean, however, that minority languages are not present in the Internet. In this paper, using the example of the Buryat language, we are trying to show that websites or webpages in minority languages are created not only for instrumental but also autotelic reasons. Buryats make efforts to preserve their own language and culture; they are driven by a desire to emphasize their activity or by comparison with other nations which have websites in their own languages. An important issue in our discussion is the relationship between efforts aimed at the preservation and development of ethnic language in spoken and written form and the development of web content in that language. We thus show the re...

Pacific Journalism Review, 2014

Book review of: Social Media and Minority Languages: Convergence and the Creative Industries, edited by Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed. Bristol, UK: Multilinguial Matters, 2013, 267pp. ISBN 9781847699046Whenever a new field of research emerges a lot of shuffling and sorting of knowledge is required to establish a niche, to define its boundaries, to encourage acknowledgement of the area and to stimulate debate concerning the application of various methodologies and theoretical frameworks. This is the case with Social Media and Minority Languages: Convergence and the Creative Industries. The catalyst for the book’s production, as implied by the title, is the technological advancement of social media, the resulting convergence of media in the digital age, and perhaps most importantly the positive and negative effects these have on minority or minoritised languages. Yet in reviewing its 17 chapters by more than 30 authors, it is clear the overall objective appears t...

The affordances associated with networked multilingualism (Androutsopoulos, 2015) have led social media scholars to replace traditional notions of code-switching with broader concepts such as translingual practices. In an attempt to further our understanding of online multilingual linguistic practices in the context of educational telecollaboration, we examined a series of interactions taken from a larger online ethnography of a global community of English as a foreign language (EFL) educators. We describe and illustrate how, when, and why participants drew on their multilingual repertoires within a Facebook group, created by two EFL teachers for their students and where English served as the primary shared linguistic resource. Taking a computer-mediated discourse analytic approach to analyzing data that included a total of 1,206 posts and comments on the group's Facebook page, ethnographic interviews with the teachers, and online documents from their telecollaboration, we found that although this group was discursively constructed as an English-only zone by the teachers for their students to practice English, all participants—especially the teachers—eventually broke this rule, as they drew on both Spanish and Arabic for a variety of purposes, such as selecting an addressee, establishing solidarity, and modeling intercultural sensitivity.

Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, 2016

Nordlyd, 2013

The freedom of choosing what language to use in various contexts is restricted by a wide range of non-linguistic factors. One often-overlooked factor is the availability of a digital infrastructure for the languages in question. To put it bluntly: With no keyboard layout available there also will be no texts written. The article looks at different aspects related to minority languages and digital linguistic resources.