News

Twitter has become "a home for minority language communities" reports fastcompany.com, quoting the BBC World Service.

The Social network already boasts a large number of non-English speaking users, though the extent to which minority, and in some cases almost extinct languages would find a voice on Twitter could not have been foreseen.

The website Indigenous Tweets, created by computational linguistics professor Kevin Patrick Scannell, features of list of 70 minority languages, ranging from "better-known tongues" such as Haitian Creole and the Basque language Euskera (that rate in first and second place respectively followed by third place Welsh) to Australian indigenous language Gamilaraay of which, says fastcompany.com, there are only three surviving speakers.

Scannell apparently hopes that Indigenous Tweets will "help build online language communities through Twitter".