Masters Thesis

Social media: facilitating language revitalization in endangered midwestern Native American languages

Language attrition is the process by which languages begin to lose features and may ultimately become extinct. When a language dies, it is a huge loss in terms of culture, identity, history, art, and ways of understanding the world. We are moving into an ever-increasing digital age, and there is a fear of language globalization. To prevent language loss, minority communities are utilizing social media for the purpose of language revitalization. This thesis explores the question of what social media-related tools are being used for language revitalization, how these tools work and what the popularity of these tools is as a means for language maintenance. This research involves ten endangered Native American languages of the Midwest. A Google search for these languages was conducted to discover what revitalization tools were readily available to the community. This general search was followed by an examination of the linguistic organizations and universities, which focus on Native American languages to assess the tools being used for revitalization purposes. Finally, a survey was conducted within the communities to determine the level of awareness and utilization of these tools. The results confirm that social media is widely being used for language maintenance; a Google search for one language in particular with 20 known speakers surprisingly produced 93,000 websites, videos, blogs, etc. The majority of community pages focus on gatherings and social events, with the minority language sparingly used. The world wide web presence in the language and/or about it indicates the interest by the community to maintain or revitalize the language. The linguistic organization, university, and government pages include audio files and other more explicitly language-based tools. The overwhelming availability for language revitalization tools suggests that an attempt is being made by the community and others to maintain endangered languages using modern technology and social media, which refutes the idea that social media is extinguishing these languages. It is important to raise the awareness of these social media-based tools because the more we work towards language maintenance and revitalization, the more endangered languages will flourish.

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