The Role of New Media in Minority- and Endangered-Language Communities

Abstract

to the examples mentioned in Jany's (2018) paper on the role of social media in endangered-language contexts and the survey on European minority languages in new media by Ferre-Pavia and colleagues (2018), as well as Gómez Menjívar and Chacón's (2019) edited volume on technology and social networks in Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America. Theory, method, and dataTheoretically this chapter relies on Post-Colonial Studies (Ashcroft et al. 2013), specifically how colonial and imperial linguistic and other practices of the past and present as well as globalisation can be counteracted online and with the help of social media.The selection criteria for the types of new media examined in this chapter are based on Flew ( 2014), who defines it as media containing the three dimensions of 1) computing information technology, 2) a communication network, and 3) content.As such, the present analysis excludes digital materials not containing all of these three dimensions, such as online dictionaries, Wikipedia, digital corpora, Unicode, machine translation and similar technological solutions (see e.g.Buszard-Welcher 2018), and apps created specifically for language learning (see e.g.Rosell-Aguilar 2017).The research questions are: How have different minority-and endangeredlanguage communities used and engaged with new media?What is the significance and function of different types of new media in the endangered language for the speech community?What recent developments have taken place in the use of new media in selected endangered-language communities across the world?The chapter provides a literature review and synthesis of recent studies on Indigenous and other endangered-language new media.It examines the uses and functions of different new media platforms by including case studies from different parts of the world.The data include extracts from new media, where relevant.The authors acknowledge the Eurasian and Anglo-American focus of our chapter, and their subject-position as scholars based in Europe. Case studies The global reach of YouTubeYouTube is a hugely popular video-sharing site that can serve as an important tool for endangered-language speakers as it is a way of creating and disseminating content to a large global audience without the need for largescale funding or the support of commercially driven mainstream TV channels and music labels.In majority-language contexts, YouTube content includes music videos, comedy, short and longer films, and other forms of media, and these different genres are also increasingly appearing in minority and endangered languages as well.Recent years have seen the proliferation of endangered-language music videos on YouTube.These fall into two categories, both of which play a role in the revitalisation of endangered languages.The first category consists of original

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