Bye bye Clecs

Whereabouts @Toffidil ? I do STEM ambassador style stuff and could hook them up with a codeclub type arrangement. There’s a big push at the moment do do more of those yn Gymraeg.

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I’ll send a PM - I expect you may already talking to this particular school?

Think you hit the nail on the head there, Rob. Basically, people are too busy, life’s too short and once the language is no longer a USP for the user, why would you use it when the competition is so fierce (and good, TBH).

I’m just randomly throwing this in from an old article by Kate Figueredo relating to the TV programme (at the time) by the name of Ar Lafar.

“Of all the world’s minority languages, Welsh is currently the third most used on Twitter. With Twitter, Facebook, blogs, text messages and e-mail many more people are now regularly writing in Welsh without anybody to ‘police’ them or to prevent them creating their own new dialects of Welsh.”

I’m not sure if she meant third in the World, UK or Wales.

Edited update:
Yes, it’s the world :slight_smile: but just to confirm, in 2011 it was the 3rd most common MINORITY language.

The most tweeted minority languages according to IndigenousTweets.com:

  1. Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haiti) - 6878 users
  2. Euskara (Basque Country) - 3788 users
  3. Cymraeg (Wales) - 2613 users
  4. Frysk (Netherlands) - 1883 users
  5. Setswana (South Africa) - 314 users
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Sometimes it is easier to see solutions by looking at a parallel case, rather than your own problem.

I was a user of the 2nd most popular minority language in the UK after Welsh (British Sign Language). Still waiting for Twitter to work with that. (No, it is not a transliteration of English, but is a language in its own right with its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, order, voice, regional variations, etc. so you cannot just expect people to type in a written UK language.) Imagine creating a video-network just for British Sign Language users… and BSL is completely different from American Sign Language so they would need their own network, too.

In reality, rather than creating another new tool (at great expense) it is often far easier/simpler/more likely to be successful if you bend an existing tool to your own ends. In the above example some video tool, such as Google hangouts, YouTube, Zoom, etc depending on the way you want to communicate in a signed language.

In the case of a Welsh Twitter-like network, using specific Welsh Twitter tags sounds like a great idea. It might not be perfect, but it could well do the job. If you wanted to go the whole hog it might be nice to have a Welsh Twitter client - far easier to create the language files as a ‘skin’ for an existing product than design a new product from scratch.

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