Speakers of indigenous and minority languages around the world are struggling to keep their languages and cultures alive. More and more language groups are turning to the web as a tool for language revitalization, and as a result there are now thousands of people blogging and using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in their native language.
For you indigenous bilingual twitter fans out there do you ever wonder if you could connect to other people around the world that speak the same indigenous language that you speak? Well the web now has what is called Indigenous Tweets, where bilingual individuals can tweet in their own indigenous language.
The primary aim of Indigenous Tweets is to help build online language communities through Twitter. The site makes it easier for speakers of indigenous and minority languages to find each other.
I’m not talking about your regular Spanish and French languages, but Ka ‘Olelo Hawai’i (Hawaiian language), Kreyol Ayisyen (Haitian Creole language), Maori (Native language of New Zealand), Chamoru (Native language of Guam), Cymraeg (Welsh language), and other indigenous languages that are not used and known too much around the world.
The main page lists all of our supported languages 70 languages. Find your language in the table, click on the row, and you will be directed to a new page that lists up to the top 500 Twitter users in your language.
This is meant to be a kind of “menu” of people who tweet in your language whom you might want to follow on Twitter. If you click on someone in the table, it will open a new window or tab with their Twitter profile, so you can see some of their recent tweets and decide if you want to follow them or not.
Ka ‘Olelo Hawai’i has 24 users and 555 tweets so far. I noticed that this is a great way for businesses and organizations in the Hawaiian community to connect with each other because there were lots of companies that were users.
Ola Ka 'Olelo 