Indian Country reports on a math teacher of Saint Louis University, USA, who proves that a bit of imagination can also dust off endangered languages.

Born into an Irish family, Kevin Scannell grew up in Boston but decided to recover his roots once done with university. So he learned Irish Gaelic, and now returns to Ireland every year to immerse himself in the languages of his origins.

It is the Gaelic language that drew him to ponder on endangered languages, and to imagine that the instruments of globalization, instead of being another threat, could be a chance to revitalize these languages; at least with the young generations. So he dedicated the past decade to developing online tools for minority languages.

Kevin Scannell by John Schreiber

His first achievement was to translate the Mozilla Firefox search engine into Irish, four years ago. Then creating one program after the other, he ended up looking into Twitter, a tool that counts 175 million registered accounts (many of which aren’t actually active) across the world! And in March, he launched IndigenousTweets.com, aiming to help indigenous languages develop by linking Twitter users who speak these languages. The idea is simple: get online, spot other users who tweet in the same language, sign in as a « follower », and start receiving tweets…

The website began with 35 languages and reached nearly a hundred within two months, from all around the world! The spin that spices the search: the language names appear… undubbed! That is if you follow the listing of the most tweeted languages, in first position you’ll find kreyol Ayisyen (Haitian Creole), followed by euskara (Basque), cymraeg (Welsh), frysk (Frisian), setswana (a language of Botswana), kapampangan (language of the Philippines), etc.

Very positive, Kevin Scannell believes that « The Internet is also a tool we can use to combat globalization and colonization. The important thing is for people to use their language if they want it to survive. The Internet – websites like Twitter and Facebook, blogs and e-mail – give people an opportunity to write and chat and be creative while using their language in a natural way.

Of course some might object that the tools are only geared towards the young, while those who speak endangered languages are more likely to be aged and impervious to technology. But the article mentions a counterexample, that of Barbara Nolan, a Nishnaabe-kwe woman of 64 who lives in Ontario: Barabara used to teach her language at school before starting to take part in developing curriculum, teaching immersion courses, and eventually refocusing her work on the Internet. She’s the creator and head of BarbaraNolan.com, with online video Anishinaabemowin courses!

Read full article here.

To have a language listed at IndigenousTweets.com, contact Kevin Scannell.