Every 14 days, a language dies. But there’s a way to keep indigenous and minority languages alive: bring communities of speakers together.

A computer scientist and mathematics professor at St. Louis University, Kevin Scannell* has been tracking the loss of languages. When we asked him about the severity of the situation, he summarized the findings of UNESCO:

More than 1000 languages are listed as "severely" or "critically" endangered which means that only people in the grandparents' generation or older still speak the language—without serious revitalization efforts, we expect these to die out with that oldest generation, in the very short term.

To help revitalize such indigenous tongues as Tamasheq, Dzhudezmo, and Anishinaabemowin, Kevin created Indigenous Tweets. The program scans Twitter for three-character sequences called "3-grams" that serve as a kind of fingerprint for statistical identification. The results are grouped by language and by Tweeter. So far, the program has uncovered more than 250 languages on Twitter, of which 139 could be considered minority or indigenous. The discoveries reflect real people speaking these languages today, not just translations of texts stored online.

Through Indigenous Tweets, those who speak minority languages can find accounts to follow — and potential conversation partners.

*In 2011 Kevin was on sabbatical at Twitter working in search relevance. He has since returned to teaching full time.

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