What happens when algorithms begin shaping our slang? 🧠✨ In Algospeak, linguist Adam Aleksic explores how the internet rewires the way we talk — from “brainrot” memes to “unlive.” I laughed, learned, and slightly panicked. #BookReview #Language #Nonfiction
Chris Harvey is the man behind languagegeek.com, a site that provides keyboards and fonts in more than 100 Indigenous languages. He's made it his passion to provide Indigenous people with access to minority languages, calling it a human rights issue.
Harvey, 47, is the man behind languagegeek.com, a site that provides keyboards and fonts in more than 100 Indigenous languages, including all of the ones in northern Canada, as well as languages in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.
Harvey, who is from southern Ontario and not Indigenous, said he's had the "language bug" since those formative years and has made it his passion to provide Indigenous people with access to minority languages. He calls it a human rights issue.
"I figure it's only fair. I can get English and Russian and German on my computer, but why can't I get languages across Canada?" he said.
"Smaller languages need every bit of help they can, because the dominant languages of the world are constantly bombarding." (...)
Language Geek has keyboards that reprogram buttons on your keyboard and how they access unicode — the industry standard for text on computers. So by downloading a keyboard with Dene fonts, for example, a regular key on your computer will now have a new typeface, like this nasal e: ę́.
Over the years Harvey has been invited to Indigenous communities to work on computerizing their languages. Around 2006 the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute invited him to Fort McPherson, N.W.T., to work on transliterating its dictionary project from print to online.
Working with a language committee of elders and teachers, he said they had to decide right then and there what shape the orthography would take.
"What were the exact shapes of the accent marks? Where should they appear? Does the 'i' have a dot on it or not?" he recalls.
"All these sort of little fiddly things to make sure that the cultural institute and the elders were getting the exact look of the script that they wanted."
Years later he was invited to Inuvik to work on Inuvialuktun, then to Yellowknife for the Dene languages, like Denesuline and Tlicho.
This is the first publication of DigiGlot,a biweekly collaborative newsletter examining how indigenous, minority, and endangered language communities are adopting and adapting technology for their own needs.
A new newsletter on technology and smaller languages from Rising Voices. Excerpt and table of contents:
Welcome to the inaugural edition of DigiGlot, a bi-weekly collaborative newsletter that reports on how indigenous, minority, and endangered language communities are adopting and adapting technology to increase the digital presence of their languages, and in the process changing the internet landscape by increasing linguistic diversity online.
1 Tech and digital activism on the roster for the International Year of Indigenous Languages
2 Are “extended” Latin characters slowing the growth of African Wikipedias?
3 Wikipedia's Universal Language Selector adds three West African languages
4 Modernizing Hawaiian-language text with the push of a button
5 Will Siri and Alexa speak Welsh someday?
6 Voice recognition technologies help to document the Seneca language
7 Upcoming Events & Opportunities
