2014-02-27

Indigenous Tweets #IMLD14 Roundup

Last Friday February 21st was International Mother Language Day, a celebration of linguistic diversity originally created by UNESCO in 1999.  This year, together with Rising Voices and the Living Tongues Institute, we tried to encourage people to tweet in their native language using the hashtag #imld14 (#dilm14 in Spanish).    We were thrilled with the response, and you can see some of the many tweets by searching for #imld14 on Twitter, or by checking out the Storify created by Laura Morris from Rising Voices.

For fun, I looked specifically at tweets written in any of the 157 languages we're tracking on the Indigenous Tweets site. In all, there were 491 tweets containing #imld14 or #dilm14, written in 31 of the 157 languages.  Leading the way were Gàidhlig with 158 tweets, followed by 74 tweets in Aragonese, 45 in Ojibwe/Nishnaabemwin, 41 in Malagasy, and 28 in Irish/Gaeilge.

One of the primary goals of the Indigenous Tweets project is to get people to use their language every day on Twitter and other social media sites.    We hope that a few of you who did this for the first time for #imld14 will continue to tweet in your native language and encourage others in your community to do the same.

For additional inspiration, we'll close with a sampling of tweets in a few other languages.   Looking forward to an even better turnout for #imld15!!

Chichewa:
Nahuatl:

Manx Gaelic:

Lezgian:
Karuk:
Nez Perce:
North Sámi:
Māori: