Ladino and its online community will be one of the topics along with other minority/endangered/revived languages.
Edinburgh Language Event wrote:The Positive Impact of Digital Homelands on the Language Revitalization of Diasporic Languages: the case of Ladino: By virtue of their nature, diasporic languages often lack a unified geographical territory, which prevents their intergenerational transmission. However, in recent decades there has been a significant trend in the emergence of digital homelands (Held, 2010), i.e., virtual communities where the diasporic language in question is used as the only means of communication between users. According to Held, virtual communities are not just mere spaces for communication, but they have the potential to become “a territory where a culture may be revitalized after having faced a state of severe decline”, which has also been referred to as a “kingdom of the word” (Shandler, 2004), or “a national language of nowhere”
The revival of Manx is an interesting topic about which I would love to know more.
Edinburgh Language Event wrote:Back from the dead: the revival of Manx:
In this talk, Christopher Lewin will draw on his personal experience as a member of the contemporary Manx-speaking community in the Isle of Man as well as his research as a scholar of the Celtic languages and a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Once considered a thing of the past following its demise as a community language in the nineteenth century and the death of the last traditional speaker in 1974, the Manx language has enjoyed a significant resurgence in recent decades, being learnt by hundreds of adults as well as school pupils, as well as a small number who have been raised in the language in the home. A significant development was the establishment in 2001 of a Manx-medium primary school, perhaps unique in Europe as a case of immersion education in a language which is extinct in its historical form. The revival of Manx raises a number of fascinating questions about the degree of continuity and rupture between traditional and revived forms of a language, and the role of individual speakers and the community in reimagining and remaking the language of their ancestors.
This has a lot of relevance to me. My children are of Manx heritage. My daughter was born on the Isle of Man. The revival of a dead language has relevance to Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol which will soon reach the phase where it will have no more native-speakers left. So the experience of the Manx revival could be very relevant to Ladino's survival and perhaps may show a path to its possible revival.
Edinburgh itself is a beautiful city. I visited Edinburgh one time in January, several years ago, and didn't even need to walk as the wind conveniently blew me around everywhere. There's a reason why I live in the Caribbean.
. Anyway, I hope they put up videos of the speakers.
