Speak Yiddish to me: how social media is helping save rare and endangered languages
Social media is a force for good. A single tweet can get thousands of people rallying around a common cause — be it global (climate change), national (the Australian bushfires), or personal (a sick kid in need of money). But forests and lives aren’t the only things that social media can save. It provides tools for the preservation of cultural objects — including endangered languages.
A brief primer on language extinction
The number of languages in existence greatly exceeds the total number of countries. Around 7 thousand languages are spoken across 200 or so nations. However, this diversity is easy to miss. Top 23 languages are native to most — while the bottom 3000 are endangered. Chances are, your hometown also has a language of its own. Take New York City, for example — home to the Met, the home of the Mets and the birthplace of the Munsee language.
Never heard of Munsee? You’re not alone — there are just two native speakers left, they’re both over 70, and they live in Ontario, Canada.
Languages that reach the brink of extinction usually owe their downfall to a number of socio-political factors. Munsee was spoken by the Lenape peoples — Native American tribes from the North-East. They were driven out of their homeland, systematically persecuted, and forced to speak English. For many languages like Munsee, the final nail in the coffin was globalisation. In a global market there are no reasons to speak a language without global reach.
It is estimated that around 90% of all currently spoken languages will go extinct in the next 30 years. This loss of diversity will come at a great cultural cost. Whereas animal extinction can be thwarted in captivity, you can’t shield people from globalisation. You can, however, breathe new life into rare languages. Which is what people are already doing on social media.
Efforts and campaigns
Multiple members of the Scandinavian Sami language group are already extinct. The rest are struggling. Over the past century, Sami languages were all but driven out of Russia. Their last remaining stronghold is, arguably, Norway — where Northern Sami is spoken by around 8–10 thousand people.
In an effort to popularise the language, Aili Keskitalo, a Norwegian politician, turned to social media. She is a part of the first generation to grow up speaking primarily Norwegian — not Sami — at home. So, for three years, she supervised the “Speak Sami To Me” (#sámásmuinna) campaign. Her message was simple: a language that is being used, no matter how little, can not die. She encouraged younger people to stay mindful of this fact, and use their ancestors’ native tongue online. The effects of such campaigns are hard to measure, but it definitely stirred interest among the new generation of Sami speakers.
Another example of online language popularization comes from Canada. There, a non-profit is trying to revive the Gwich’in language, which, at the moment, has less than a thousand native speakers. The #SpeakGwichinToMe movement (sadly, the names of language revival campaigns aren’t as diverse as the languages themselves) put a start to a small, but vibrant Facebook community of Gwich’in speakers. And even if in the grand scheme of things this might seem small, it means the world to the communities most affected by Gwich’in disappearance. This work inspired similar efforts from at least one other Native American group — and sparked interest from language researchers.
Compared to Gwch’in, Yiddish is a thriving language — with estimated 1.5 million native speakers worldwide. Yet the picture looks different when you realise that, prior to the Holocaust, it was the mother tongue of more than 10 million Jews. The number of Yiddish speakers is steadily declining.
Modern Jews are more likely to speak Hebrew — the language of Israel, which enjoys stronger institutional support. And the chasidic groups that speak Yiddish natively often shun technology, meaning that the number of L1 speakers online is low. Yet, despite all this, social media efforts to revitalize the language are going strong. People who didn’t speak Yiddish growing up are creating online communities. A translator by the name of Nick Block uses his Twitter account to document Yiddish words that cannot be found in a dictionary. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has a heavy social media presence. And Foreverts, known in English as The Jewish Daily Forward, still publishes a Yiddish edition of the paper online. Readers can highlight an unfamiliar word to get a definition — something that could have never been done in print.
Another vulnerable language — Aymara — has chosen a different path to ensuring its online presence for years to come. It is the second most common language in Bolivia, and, to reflect this fact, a group of volunteer started translating Facebook into their mother tongue. Even though their work isn’t over yet, they foresee it as having a big impact on Bolivian youth. In an interview with NPR, Anna Luisa Daigneault of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages said that “Having endangered languages on the Internet <..> shows [young people] that their language is still relevant today”. So even when they live in a predominantly Spanish-speaking environment, like most Bolivians do, they don’t have to think badly of their native language.
Most of the efforts described above don’t have large-scale backing. They are led by small groups of like-minded individuals that get things done just because they want them done. They don’t have a lot of followers — a few thousand, at most. In essence, these people are what we’d call ‘micro-influencers’. But for a small community, a ‘micro-influencer’ is all it takes to make a lot of difference. We at MNFST believe in changing the world from the ground up, and want to empower influencers like these — by connecting them with brands that share their beliefs. Their influence is not going to transform their entire country, but might be just enough to bring meaningful changes to their community. And language preservation work is a testament to that power.
