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, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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

in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at

Saint Louis University Saint Louis University (SLU) is a private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit research university in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Founded in 1818 by Louis William Valentine DuBourg, it is the oldest university west of the Missi ...

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an Independent city (United States), independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Miss ...

, 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 and the "better-known"

Haitian Creole Haitian Creole (; , ; , ), or simply Creole (), is a French-based creole languages, French-based creole language spoken by 10 to 12million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it ...

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 is ranked third on Indigenous Tweets. Kapampangan, 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 broad ...

, 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 connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

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