Can small languages survive in the digital era?

When Mark Smith learned that the language he’d spoken his entire life could die out in a decade, he was deeply upset. A study suggested that the use of Scottish Gaelic, which the 25-year-old learned on his native Isle of Lewis, was “at the point of collapse”. Without increasing efforts, it would only survive in “isolated networks of elderly speakers”.

Mark refused to believe it. “I know so many people who are my age and younger who speak Gàidhlig.

“So, unless we all die in the next ten years, it's not going to die out,” he said joking. However, deep down he was very concerned. Mark realised that, after moving to Glasgow, he wasn’t using the language as much as back home.

“I wanted to do something that would keep the tie to Gaelic because I didn't want to be part of the problem,” he said. That’s how he started posting social media videos in Scottish Gaelic.

During the first lockdown, he launched the Instagram account @the_cooksmith to share recipes in Gaelic with English subtitles, and he has received hundreds of views and reactions since then.

“The engagement is really good, and it's always nice to see someone who's cooked what you've cooked or who appreciates what you're doing in Gaelic,” he said.

Lauren Ferguson (28), @oiseanlauren on Instagram, is also part of the Gaelic community on this social platform. Since 2018, she has been sharing make-up videos and lifestyle content in Gaelic, and she has now more than 3,000 followers.

 “The Gaelic community online has grown so much, there's loads and loads of fantastic pages showcasing different topics and people just using it in general,” she said.

In her case, it all started as a way of practising new make-up techniques, but it also became her medium to actively promote the language online.

Lauren went through Gaelic medium education in the Isle of Skye, and now she is a teacher in a Gaelic primary school. Every day, she faces the challenge to teach the language to children who only speak it in class. “None of them have Gaelic at home, so once they leave school, they find it really hard to keep a connection with the language,” she said.

However, Lauren believes social media platforms can help them fight the “misconception” that Gaelic is only a school language. “That's what young people are interested in, and I think it's really important for them to see that you can also do that in Gaelic,” she said.

Scottish Gaelic is one of the five Celtic languages spoken in the UK and Ireland. It is the third-largest one, but its use has been in decline over the past decades, especially among young people.

Data from the census show that, in most cases, the figures for minority language speakers are going down. And a drastic decline of speakers over the years can lead to the extinction of a language, an "irrecoverable loss of unique cultural knowledge embodied in it for centuries", according to UNESCO.

But in Celtic languages, there can still be a place for hope.

Although revitalising a language is a huge challenge, there have been two other languages that were resurrected from the ashes: Manx Gaelic, from the Isle of Man, and Cornish, from Cornwall. Despite being considered extinct, both are now very much alive.

According to the Isle of Man census in 2021, 2,023 people speak Manx, 2.64% of the population. The Cornwall Council, on the other hand, believes the figure is over 2,000 Cornish speakers, “around 0.5% of Cornwall’s population”.

This couldn’t have been possible without language plans and strategies that promoted these languages inside and outside schools. National and local authorities in Ireland, Wales and Scotland also have their own policies to increase the number of minority speakers.

In recent years, they’ve included a special focus on digital and online platforms, as these are now part of our lives since we are very young. 

According to the latest Ofcom media use and attitudes report, 90% of children owned their own mobile phones by the time they turned 11. For Daniel Cunliffe, Associate Professor at the University of South Wales, this is something that worries him “a bit”.

“When you look at a typical mobile phone, the whole environment of it is in the majority language,” said Cunliffe, whose research focuses on the relationship between minority languages and technology.

He speaks Welsh and believes that this language is present on every social media platform, although posts and videos in Welsh are not always easy to discover. “The music, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix… most of that is going to be in English. And it's a real challenge.

“If young people aren't using their language on their mobile phone, on their social networks, then they're not using it in the place that is most important to them,” he said.

Recent trends in social media consumption, however, could bring some hope. In the 2019 wave of the Ofcom study, they found out that children “were following an increasing number of peer-to-peer or local influencers”, known as ‘micro’ or ‘nano’ influencers, with thousands of followers rather than millions.

In other words, young people like to watch content they can relate to. So, if they speak another language besides English, it is likely that they would follow young content creators who use the same language as them.

Bethany Davies, for example, is a 24-year-old TikToker from the South-West Wales who has more than 25,000 followers . Some of her videos about the Welsh language, culture and history have received over a million views.

Surprisingly, among the positive feedback, Bethany also received lots of negative replies specifically for the language use. "You wouldn't think speaking a national language would be cause for controversy or any negativity. But I have received thousands upon thousands of comments just completely belittling the language, saying there is no use for that, that it's a dead language," she said.

Minority speakers receiving negative comments, however, is not something new. For centuries, Celtic communities were stigmatised for their languages: Welsh was banned in some schools and Irish was considered a “cause of barbarity and incivility”. Although times have changed, this heritage tied to the fear of difference could explain the negative comments speakers receive on social media nowadays.

In Donegal, Ireland, Póilín Nic Géidigh also believes her language is still stigmatised. “People went for so long saying, 'Oh, it's not worth it. Why are we learning this? You're not going to get a job through Irish',” she said.

Nevertheless, her own experience living in a Gaeltacht contradicts those beliefs. She works as an Irish newsreader in RTÉ and shows on TikTok how the Irish can also be trendy and cool. Póilín has more than 37,000 followers on TikTok and almost 4,000 on Instagram. “I think it’s really important to be present online, it actually inspires more people to just use language,” she said.

Since she actively started using Irish in her social profile a few years ago, she has noticed a “new appreciation for the Irish language”.

Dr Maggie Glass, who has been analysing the use of Irish on social media for years at the University of Limerick, confirms this paradigm shift in Irish status, both online and in real life. “Social media is allowing people to see that these languages really are modern and relevant in contemporary life,” she said.

During her PhD in Applied Linguistics, Dr Glass studied the Irish language fan communities on Twitter and detected a significant increase in users using the language. “It was absolutely fascinating to see this virtual community of fans develop over these six years because at the beginning there were very few tweets, and fewer among them were in Irish.

“And then it blossomed into this. There were like 600 audience tweets, and each piece of media was truly delightful,” she said.

Dr Glass believes that “the Internet has truly become a very important vehicle for language revitalization and language rights”, and it can also be useful to connect speakers all over the world and create online communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise. She, for example, is originally from the US and the first time she connected with Irish speaker communities it was online.

Nevertheless, the disappearance of physical communities of native speakers is one of the main challenges that Celtic languages face nowadays. As the study from the University of the Highlands and Islands found out, the diminishing social density of Gaelic speakers is a threat to the language's survival.

“I think when we lose those communities, everything else about language revitalisation gets harder,” said Ben O Ceallaigh, an expert in language regeneration and lecturer in Celtic languages at Aberystwyth University.

O Ceallaigh is not completely optimistic about the role of the Internet and social media platforms in language revitalisation. “Of course, those things are good and important, but I also don't think they're a substitute for having communities that speak these languages.

“It will be a sad day if we reach a time when you can only speak Gaelic on WhatsApp or Twitter, and there's nowhere you can go where most people just speak Gaelic, and it's a living language,” he said.

O Ceallaigh’s research is mainly focused on how neoliberalism forces like big corporations impact the health of minority languages. As part of these forces, he claims social media corporations are not neutral, and they have economic interests that determine “the extent to which we live with technological omnipresence” and to which new technologies are developed in minority languages

Dr William Lamb, a senior researcher at the University of Edinburgh, said that “English and other majority languages have a financial value to them”. Therefore, the amount of money tech companies invest in the development of new technologies in majority languages is substantially larger compared to smaller ones.

“Some tech companies are interested in helping minority languages. But mainly it's for goodwill, it's not for income generation,” he said. The lack of speech recognition technologies in Celtic languages is an example of this.

Voice assistants like Siri or Alexa have limited language options, and Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are not among them. Apple, Google, Meta, Twitter Inc. and TikTok were reached out for comment, but none of them replied by the time this article was published.

“This kind of technology develops slower in languages like Scottish Gaelic and there are different reasons for that,” explains Dr Lamb.  Besides the small income they may generate, “there tends to be more data available” with larger languages to set the devices.

Dr Lamb has worked on a speech recognition prototype for Scottish Gaelic speakers, and he admits it has been a challenge to gather all the information needed. Nevertheless, he is clear about the importance of projects like this to revitalise the language.

“Language technology is essentially another domain of communication, and if we can enable minority language speakers to participate in those domains without resorting to a majority language, then it means that people are consistently speaking smaller languages as much as they can,” Dr Lamb said.

Daniel Cunliffe also shares this point of view, as he highlights the domestic nature of speaking recognition devices: “If you can only speak to them in a majority language, then you're hearing a lot more of the majority language in your safe domestic space.

“I think these things can be kind of corrosive, they can eat away your use of the minority language,” he said.

It is undeniable that technologies have put minority speakers more in contact with majority languages, and that can degrade the use of their other languages. However, social platforms can also help learn and practise them.

When someone replies to Mark Smith's cooking videos in Gaelic, for instance, he gets to practice his writing, which he wouldn’t do otherwise. “Whenever someone texts me, I try and text back, and it's good because speaking and writing are two very different things. So, the online community really helps,” he said.

For Daniel Cunliffe, it is not a matter of being “optimistic or pessimistic”: “Even if you thought these were the most terrible things in the world and were killing your language at a remarkable rate, the technology is going to be there. And if your language isn't there, that is the worst thing that can happen because it essentially means it's irrelevant to young people”.

Fortunately, Mark, Lauren, Bethany and Póilín don’t plan to stop creating content in their languages any time soon, and they all hope more people will follow their steps.

“Every time a young person texts one of their friends and does it in Welsh or watches a Welsh language TikTok, then that's a little victory. And we should celebrate those little victories,” he said.