Indigenous Tweets is a website that records

minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) and ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

messages to help indigenous speakers contact each other. It was founded in March 2011 by Kevin Scannell, who does research in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at

Saint Louis University Saint Louis University (SLU) is a private Jesuit research university with campuses in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, and Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1818 by Louis William Valentine DuBourg, it is the oldest university west of the Mississip ...

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...

, United States. The website's purpose is to enable minority language speakers to communicate on the Internet. On its homepage, the website displays a list of minority languages it has cached. After selecting a language, the user is brought to a table of everyone who is tweeting in that language. Indigenous Tweets provides the profile picture of each Twitter user and statistics about each person's number of followers. In addition to providing statistics about the percentage of tweets a person writes in different languages, Indigenous Tweets has a selection of the trending topics in the various minority languages.

History

At the website's inception in March 2011, it cataloged 35 languages. On April 16, 2011, it recorded tweets in 76 minority languages. By April 26, 2011, the website supported 82. The cataloged languages include the "esoteric"

Gamilaraay The Gamilaraay, also known as Gomeroi, Kamilaroi, Kamillaroi and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people whose lands extend from New South Wales to southern Queensland. They form one of the four largest Indigenous nations in Aust ...

and the "better-known"

Haitian Creole Haitian Creole (; ht, kreyòl ayisyen, links=no, ; french: créole haïtien, links=no, ), commonly referred to as simply ''Creole'', or ''Kreyòl'' in the Creole language, is a French-based creole language spoken by 10–12million people wor ...

and

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...

, which have the first and second most Tweeters, respectively.

Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...

is ranked third on Indigenous Tweets.

Kapampangan Kapampangan, Capampañgan or Pampangan may refer to: *Kapampangan people of the Philippines *Kapampangan language Kapampangan or Pampangan is an Austronesian language, and one of the eight major languages of the Philippines. It is the primary ...

, which was ranked seventh in the last week of April 2011, was the first Philippine language supported by the website.

Data mining

Indigenous Tweets employs a data bank of words and phrases from the minority languages to locate people who speak those languages. In an April 2011 interview with

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...

, Scannell said that he has spent 8 years building a data bank of around 500 languages by reviewing blogs, newspapers, and websites. Indigenous Tweets gathers data through Twitter's

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

by searching a data bank of words and phrases from the minority languages. The website's search engine cannot decipher the language of a tweet when a word is in more than one language. To avoid this conundrum, Scannell inputs words that are unique to the language.

References

External links

* * {{Official website, name=Indigenous Tweets official website Internet properties established in 2011 Linguistic minorities Twitter services and applications Language documentation Corpora Indigenous languages Indigenous mass media