According to the most conservative estimates from the United Nations, over half of all languages in the world today will be extinct by the year 2100. Maintaining Indigenous languages involves providing uses for the language. Tribal natural resources departments can provide opportunities to engage with language through communicating local ecological knowledge with citizens through social media.
A study conducted on Native people’s use of social media found that 78% of 132 participants received their news through the internet. There are three primary areas of language planning that can be aided through use of digital technologies, especially social media. These three planning categories include status, corpus, and acquisition planning. Returning to the study, Of the large majority of participants who obtain information online, 90% of those participants receive their news primarily through Facebook. The most used device by participants were smartphones.
Use of language by Tribal governmental agencies is just one-half of the equation on language revitalization through social media use. For language to take hold through these methods, people must be engaged. An effective way to drive engagement discussed by consumer engagement scholars is to create communities where individuals can participate with organizations and fellow consumers for the purpose of building community. While nation-citizen relations are certainly different from consumer-brand dynamics, it could be inferred that Tribal nations could mirror this process to “sell” language to citizens. Engagement with a post can be recorded with likes as a proxy measurement to understand how certain types of content affect engagement.
As part of a larger content analysis, I looked at the Facebook pages of Tribal Departments of Natural Resources across the United States and coded posts for language use. One year’s worth of data was coded and analyzed. I predicted that when Tribal Natural Resources pages utilize traditional language in their social media communications, engagement would increase. The sample size of the study is 964 posts, with 871 posts not including traditional language, and 93 including traditional language with a significance level of 0.05. Posts coded as containing language use had more likes overall (Mdn= 24) than posts coded as not including traditional language (Mdn= 19.41). The Mann-Whitney U-Test revealed a significant difference, U=25493.5, p=.1.177e-8, r=0.18.
The box plot above illustrates the difference in likes between posts that contain traditional language and those that do not. Box plots illustrate the distribution of the data and reveal significant outliers. This graph shows that overall posts containing traditional language in the caption receive more likes than posts that do not contain traditional language. There are far more outliers found in the no language use category, this can be explained by the much larger sample of posts without traditional language. Significant outliers were found in the no language use category, which often included posts with photos of large community events and culturally significant imagery. In the case of large community events, higher likes can be explained by people who attended interacting with the post. While this study does not record photo variables, these outliers seem to align with previous research on Tribal land management pages. Specifically research demonstrating the significant effects of different types of imagery on Tribal and non-Tribal audiences, such as “Environmental values and images: an analysis of Facebook images from Ojibwe and state natural resource management agencies”. With this study, I sought to answer the question of how the use of language affects engagement on Tribal natural resource department Facebook posts. After conducting my analysis, I have found that there is a significant difference in likes between posts that do and do not contain language. Posts containing Indigenous languages overall receive more engagement than posts that lack traditional languages. This could create the conditions for an effective use function for Indigenous languages that could greatly benefit language preservation and revitalization efforts.
In my experience connecting with my language from the Lummi Nation as a member of the Coast Salish diaspora, social media applications such as Facebook have provided an invaluable source of connection to those who still hold language knowledge. Many of whom themselves actively search for interested people to pass their knowledge forward, in hopes to preserve the old tongue long into the future. This is often done through the use of multi-modal methods such as image and text posts containing traditional language, recorded video lessons, and other kinds of content that can often initiate dialogues between learners and educators in comment sections of posts. Social media platforms, and by extension Facebook have many flaws in relation to their treatment of Indigenous peoples. On occasion, these flaws could impede language and cultural transmission through the suppression of certain kinds of Indigenous content and the dominance of non-Native languages and perspectives on the platform. Despite this, these platforms still have great potential to connect people for purposes such as language preservation and revitalization through the creation of interest groups of users and uses.
According to estimates from the United Nations, half of all world languages will be extinct by 2100. Many of these languages are those from Indigenous communities and nations. I would like to paint a different picture of the next seventy-six years, one that acknowledges the agency and ingenuity of Indigenous people. In the year 2100, Indigenous people retain and continue to develop the languages that contain the wisdom of our ancestors, and set us as distinct peoples with our own songs to sing, scientific insights to provide, and stories to tell. The importance of the gift that is language is one that can be hard to put into words, so it would be beneficial to highlight the thoughts of Jim Thunder, elder and language keeper from the Forest County Potawatomi Nation. “What will happen to a joke if no one will hear it any more? How lonely those words will be, when their is power gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.”
Kain Eller is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
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