Texting in endangered languages
This is a text message in the Sa language of Pentecost Island Vanuatu. It says "Hey, don't forget my camera!" There are about 3000 speakers of Sa and since the community has recently developed an orthography, people are happily writing the language but especially in mobile phone text messages. When mobile phones don't have the necessary orthographic characters, you use the next closest thing and you can work it out by context.
...texting may help save languages
Published Jun 30, 2011 at 05:00AM / Updated Nov 19, 2013 at 12:31AM
MEXICO CITY — In southern Chile, young speakers of Huilliche, a language that’s in peril of extinction, produce hip-hop videos and post them on the Internet.
Across the globe in the Philippines, teenagers think it’s “cool” to send mobile phone text messages in regional languages that show signs of endangerment, such as Kapampangan.
Technology, long considered a threat to regional languages, now is being seen as a way to keep young people from forsaking their native tongues for dominant languages. YouTube and Facebook, as well as Internet radio and cellphone texting, are helping minority language groups stave off death.
Linguist Samuel Herrera said he was elated to find teenagers zapping each other with text messages in Huave, an endangered language spoken only by about 15,000 people in the Tehuantepec region of Mexico, along the Pacific.
“This really strengthens the use of the language,” said Herrera, who runs the linguistics laboratory at the Institute of Anthropological Research in the Mexican capital.
Dr. Gregory Anderson, the director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, agrees. Somewhere between the ages of 6 and 20 or 25, he said, “people make a definitive decision whether to break with the language.”
“If the language isn’t being used by their peer group, then they reject it categorically,” he said.
Technology as simple as text messaging can draw them back.
“That’s exactly the hook for young people. They live in text, and they are the key stakeholders and the ones who may or may not pass it down to their own children,” Anderson said.
— McClatchy-Tribune News Service
