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Having been to a number of minority language conferences, I have come to recognise that rap music is the de facto standard for judging whether a minority language is being embraced by the youth (why?!). I am therefore pleased to commend to you The Chiel Meister on YouTube, demonstrating that Scots is alive and kicking.
Warning, caused several LOL moments – always embarrassing in a shared office environment.
Not sure what it is based on, but Indigenous Tweets http://indigenoustweets.com/ (yes, I know I haven’t made it a live link – sorry not my fault) is interesting. I haven’t made a comparison with the figures for Welsh produced by cy.umap.eu yet – perhaps IT actually draws its data from cy.umap.eu? Anyone know?
One of the problems faced by users and researchers of specific languages in web2.0 environments is the lack of an easy and reliable mechanism for finding content in that language. In many cases we are forced to use searches (but what terms to search for?) or following networks of some type (but the network relationships are rarely purely linguistic). This is where aggregators have a role to play, acting as linguistic portals to a particular web2.0 environment (though there are still issues in terms of their validity as a research tool).
http://umap.eu/ is providing such a portal for Twitter in Basque, Catalan and Welsh. For the researcher, the Welsh service http://cy.umap.eu/ gives a fascinating insight into what is hot (currently plaidcymru), how many Welsh Twitterers there are, who they are, how many of their Tweets are in Welsh and so on. Hopefully for the Welsh speaker it provides a handy way of finding people to follow and tapping in to interesting trends.
Sorry for the “dead” links, seems to be some issue with the blogging platform as this form of URL. Hopefully moving to new platform soon.
I was just idly converting currencies on the XE website when I found myself looking at the banner advert. Usually I tend not to notice such adverts, and I couldn’t quite understand why I was drawn to this one – then I realised, it was in Welsh! An advert from the Electoral Commission about the referendum. I think this is the first time I have come across a Welsh language advertisement on such a general purpose site (yes I was converting into GBP and realise that the advert was targeted to the UK – possibly to my IP address, anyone know?).
According to information from Symantec the Welsh language has reached a new level in its online use – it is now being used for scam emails. Is this progress I wonder?
Wales Online has provided a mildly diverting interactive map showing percentage of Welsh speakers, by age, by region. I am not sure that the title of the article is actually very helpful in understanding what the map is showing, or about some of the implications in the article. It’s also not clear what data it is based on – I guess the last census. Still mildly diverting on a wet Thursday afternoon.
The Wales Blog Awards have released their long list of nominated blogs, including categories for Best Sports Blog, Best Political Blog, Best Welsh Language Blog, Best Community Blog, Best Lifestyle Blog, Best Writing on a Blog and Best Technology Blog.
As far as I can tell, there are no Welsh language blogs in any category aside from Best Welsh Language Blog (no I haven’t checked them all, so yes, I could be wrong). As far as I can tell, nominators were free to choose whatever category they wanted to compete in.
I’m not sure what (if anything) this tells us about Welsh language blogging, did Welsh language bloggers only chose to compete in the Welsh language category, were the English language blogs just judged to be better than the Welsh language blogs, were Welsh language blogs not considered in non Welsh language categories?
Does anyone have any insight on these matters? Is Welsh language blogging in a malaise, is blogging just old hat and are all the cwl cats are now tweeting?
Anyway – nice to see some of the best of Welsh language blogging celebrated – congratulations to all those who were nominated – I’m looking forward to the results on the 14th October!