We are going to move from elections to global public policy by first noting the soaring mentioning of TWITTER in main stream media during this election season. Here in Baltimore we see or soon to be former mayor high-fived for her Tweeting prowess----DeRay and Kwame Rose were both spoken of by how many TWITTER-followers they had. I personally have no desire to be tied to people or have them tied to me that much----but there is a reason media has exploded with this information-----social media will be changing next decade and Facebook will be out----texting in as Americans will mostly not be able to access streaming video and Facebook, not able to become profitable or gain traction overseas---will divest and end. Johns Hopkins likes to attach itself to the Facebook idea as Zuckerberg was attending Hopkins for a while and Hopkins as a global surveillance corporation developed the idea for surveillance and indeed---since its start Facebook has been the place for NSA, Homeland Security, and any future corporate employer to know who we are. It's never been secret----and if elections go as planned with Wall Street global pols attached to President, Governor, and Mayor positions---they will not need Facebood for surveillance as there is now SMART CITY surveillance technology and they will start eliminating ways US citizens can communicate---BYE, BYE US POST OFFICE THEY SAY!
That leaves text messaging which is already what many of the low-income citizens have already been pushed to----more US citizens moved to poverty with this coming economic crash will be in the same boat. Also as I mentioned earlier---here in Baltimore we are already seeing high-speed internet being dominated by global corporations and their overseas connections taking all our high-speed internet access---dropped phone calls---no video streaming with WiFi----are early signs.
THIS IS WHY WALL STREET HAS NATIONAL MEDIA ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT TWEETING AND GETTING THE LOCAL LEADERS TALKING ABOUT IT TOO.
'On Twitter, DeRay McKesson is the man. Followed by Beyonce, he regularly exchanges tweets with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and posts selfies with celebrities in between inspirational sonnets and black fist emojis.
His television interviews with Wolf Blitzer, on several shows on Comedy Central, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert were widely shared and celebrated by many.
BLACK LIVES MATTER LEADER RUNNING FOR BALTIMORE MAYOR
He's wicked smart, casts a great image, is ambitious, and is clearly not afraid of the camera.
All of that said, if he could've run for Mayor of Twitter, he would've likely been competitive. Mayor of Baltimore? Not so much'.
Rawlings-Blake named top U.S. mayor on Twitter
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that she will not seek re-election as Mayor for the city of Baltimore. She stated that she is going to spend her remaining 15 months as Mayor focusing on the recovery efforts since the Freddie Gray unrest.
Colin CampbellContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
Report says Baltimore's mayor is the best — at TwitterBaltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who decided not to run for re-election this year, was named the top mayor in the U.S. on Twitter in a report Tuesday by an international marketing firm.
In the report, Development Counsellors International examined the Twitter use of the mayors of the 250 largest U.S. cities, and ranked them by audience, frequency, responsiveness, engagement and influence.
"Twitter has emerged as a powerful tool for mayors to interact with citizens on a daily basis and actively listen to views outside of their inner circle," said Andy Levine, the firm's president. "Our aim was to highlight the 'jedi masters' of this important communications tool."
Rawlings-Blake said she was proud of the recognition.
"We have worked hard to leverage the power of 140 characters to create an important communication tool that has connected me to Baltimore City in new ways," she said in a statement.
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Zuckerberg was of course outed in national media for QUESTIONABLE public listing tactics when he waited until AFTER all Facebook most profitable years in the US to take the corporation public knowing those main street investors would be on the downward value side of Facebook stock. It was illegal because he ignored standard practices and was allowed to get away with it as usual. The idea was to expand Facebook globally to make it more profitable and they have had success for a decade globally but here is the catch-------nations around the world are seeing Facebook as a US surveillance tool and are now starting to create their own national versions of Facebook and pushing US Facebook out of many national markets. This will continue and drive Facebook profit down and down. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has long ago DIVESTED all those billions made from Facebook into other global corporations and really has no vested interest in keeping Facebook floating----this article shows the decline of Facebook globally-----and we will see social media like My Space and Facebook disappear as Americans like me have much of our business and communications tied to it. This is why broad based small business media is CRITICAL----print media, radio, TV because internet access is going, going, gone.
I keep my website page and blog to add diversity with NO STREAMING VIDEO for this reason---but even that will be compromised if citizens cannot afford to access the internet. If you have a website business you need to look at this because if you have streaming video attached to that webpage it will not open.
Is Facebook Losing Teens?
Written by Sebastian Hedencrona on Friday, November 8 2013
Yes, Facebook is losing teens.
As far as GlobalWebIndex is concerned, the biggest news from Facebook’s Q3 earnings call last week was a statement by Facebook’s CFO, David Ebersam, where he said engagement among teens was declining, and Facebook itself is having a hard time measuring the decline.
Here is an excerpt of his comments: "this is a hard issue for us to measure ... we've developed other analytic methods. ... our best announcement on youth usage [is that] among U.S. teens was stable overall from Q2 to Q3 but we did see a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens." He also added that the decline was of “questionable significance”.
Facebook usage globally is something that GlobalWebIndex has been tracking for the past four years, and we thought it important to add some insight on Facebook’s popularity among teenagers, not only in the US, but around the world. Below are answers to three key points that will do just that:
1. “Are teens leaving Facebook?”
Firstly, it is important to understand how GlobalWebIndex defines active usage: users must have an account on Facebook as well as have “used or contributed to Facebook in the past month on any device.” This is a simple measure of active engagement that works very well in market research, something that is near impossible to track using passive data collection or analytics due to the issues with auto-logins, multiple devices and ghost accounts (an issue we explored in an earlier post). In short, it is easy for analytics to record users as active despite no actual human activity. Also, Facebook uses a very broad definition of “active” which includes signing in with a Facebook login on a third party site or clicking a “Like” button. These would likely not be recognised by a user as being active. For these reasons, we believe our market research approach provides the most accurate measure.
Moving back to the issue at hand, Chart 1 below tracks Facebook active usage among 16-19 year olds in the US vs. Global (our research covers 16-65 year olds in 32 countries) since Q2 2012.
What this clearly demonstrates is that just 56% of US teens claim to be active on Facebook in Q3 2013, down 35% from Q1 2013 (76%). This is a substantial decline but also one that is mirrored globally (excluding China).
So the answer to this is categorically yes. Facebook is losing teens all over the world from its peak in Q4 2012.
2. “Is Facebook close to ‘penetrated in the US’ amongst teens – as claimed by David Ebersam”?
GlobalWebIndex data shows that 89% of US teens and 88% of teens globally (excl. China) have an account on Facebook. This, one could argue, is near penetration.
3. Is the Facebook teen decline only a US phenomenon?
David Ebersam also alluded to the fact that this is only a US phenomenon. Chart 1 above shows that actually the global figures are similar. If we segment (chart 2 below) this by market, we get a clear context and can see that decline across 2013 amongst teens is much larger in other markets. The lowest levels of decline are in South Africa, Poland and Russia where adoption of Facebook has been a more recent phenomenon. However, some markets show substantially higher levels of decline, led by the Netherlands which has seen active user numbers fall by 52% y-o-y in Q2 2013. The Dutch are followed by Malaysia (-45%), France (-44%), Turkey (-43%) and Mexico (-35%), demonstrating that Facebook teen decline, global and happening on all continents.
What does this mean?
The key question we are asking internally is whether this slump is driven by seasonality in Facebook usage or is, in fact, a genuine slide in user numbers.
What is clear is that competition from other social media platforms is increasing, and as we can see users are adopting supplementary services that serve specific needs rather than switching to other platforms entirely. Mobile is a key driver of this change where built-in OS functions and applications make it very easy to use many different services, all of which focus on doing very specific tasks e.g Snapchat or Whatsapp.
Moving forward, we are tackling these questions in two ways. Firstly, the Stream Analyst team is investigating where teens are going if not to Facebook. Secondly, we are releasing the next wave of our Q4 data at the end of December 2013, which will enable us to better address the seasonality question.
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You will read about many nations blocking Facebook----censoring Facebook but you don't hear much about nations developing their own national version of Facebook to replace what will become a complete refusal to allow Facebook in other nations. The amount of money and time being placed into circumventing all this censuring has many around the world looking for different vehicles of global communications.
I have seen for a few years ordinary media outlets once having the Facebook Share icon no longer having it as it becomes harder and harder to share articles on Facebook----I have been copying and pasting them but as we know TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT seeks to make it illegal to copy the most basic of journalism including these kinds of articles. So, soon enough---if you cannot afford a subscription you will not receive information and that will be OVER 80% OF AMERICANS VERY SOON.
The Great Firewall Blocking Facebook In China
The Chinese government blocked access to Facebook across the entire country in July 2009 in a response to unrest.
12:43, UK, Tuesday 04 February 2014
Facebook mobile apps open in China, but they do not update
For many around the world, Facebook is part of everyday life.
It has 1.2 billion active users globally, 757 million of whom log on daily. Many more than that will have flirted with it over the past decade.
But Facebook remains beyond the reach of one fifth of the world's population - the 1.3 billion people of China.
The Chinese government blocked access to Facebook across the entire country in July 2009. Anyone who's visited China on holiday or for business will know: it just doesn't work.
Try to log on to it from a desktop and the page simply won't open. On smartphones, the app opens up but won't update.
China's government has little time for Mark Zuckerberg's vision
It is blocked, so the joke goes, by The Great Firewall of China.
Facebook falls into a category of websites that China's Communist leaders deem unsuitable for their population.
Others include Twitter and YouTube.
Even some Google searches (the sensitive ones: think Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan) are tripped up by the Great Firewall.
News organisations who upset the government find themselves sporadically blocked too. Current culprits include the New York Times and Bloomberg.
Somewhere in China, an army of censors with sophisticated equipment do the blocking and the monitoring.
There was a time when Chinese users could "poke" and "tag" as much as they wished. But in July 2009, riots in the country's far western Xinjiang Province between Muslim and Han Chinese communities put an end to it all.
Activists for Xinjiang's independence were found to have used Facebook to garner support.
Quickly, the government realised the potential power of Facebook to connect the aggrieved and rally the discontented right across the vast nation.
They also realised that they couldn't simply censor specific posts given that it's operated via servers outside China. The only answer therefore was to block it completely. They did the same with Twitter.
Last month, the Chinese Ambassador to the UK defended his government's censorship of websites in an interview on Sky News.
Homegrown alternatives like Weibo have grown in popularity. Their servers are in China and so that army of censors can delete specific posts which concern them.
There are ways to leap over the Great Firewall which are vital for those of us who live in China and use Facebook, Twitter and Google for work.
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used to trick computers and phones into thinking they are operating in another country. I use my VPN countless times every day.
China's not alone. The people of North Korea don't even have an internet.
The regime of Kim Jong-Un has developed its own 'intranet' - a mini and highly restricted version of the World Wide Web.
Curiously though, visitors to North Korea are able to use Facebook and Twitter, perhaps because of the less sophisticated nature of North Korean censors.
In Egypt, the 2011 revolution became known as the Facebook Revolution by those who attributed the overthrow of the government to activity on Facebook. The site was blocked for a few days.
Who'd have thought a website dreamt up by college students in Boston could, in just 10 years, grow quite so powerful?
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Just to refresh this IPO listing of Facebook came at the same time Americans were made aware of the massive Wall Street frauds. This article looks at how this IPO listing in one way was fraudulent but as well the process of allowing a small group of venture capitalists fund Facebook in its early climb to profit-making and then having them as major shareholders at this IPO listing taking most of that initial profit knowing Facebook stock values were going down hill was not legal as well. Main street investors came on board at an initial IPO value and started losing money right away.
From surveillance tool to IPO profit scam----we entered the 21st century economy model of profit anyway you can----as usual under Obama nothing never occurred---they took the money and expanded overseas.
Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO Flop Ever
After Facebook's disastrous debut, the preferred clients of big banks walked away with huge profits. How? Public documents and interviews with dozens of investment bankers and research analysts reveal that the Street caught wind of something the public didn't. The social network and the banks told half the story. Here is the other half.
Facebook IPO Lawsuits Consolidated in New York
By Sarah Pierce
Facebook investors won their motion to consolidate dozens of securities fraud lawsuits filed throughout the United States over the bungled Facebook IPO before a federal judge in New York. The social networking behemoth, NASDAQ exchange and Facebook’s underwriter’s face over 30 lawsuits seeking class-action status on behalf of Facebook investors who suffered major losses during the company’s initial public offering in May.
A panel of federal judges ordered the potential Facebook IPO class action lawsuits to be transferred to U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan. The move was requested by Facebook and the majority of investor Plaintiffs because witnesses, IPO evidence and the underwriter banks are located in New York. Only a few investors sought to keep their cases in California.
Investors allege in the potential Facebook IPO class action lawsuit that the company, its officers, directors and underwrites violated securities laws by making false and misleading statements in connection with the May 18 IPO, which was tarnished by technical glitches on the NASDAQ exchange and accusations that Facebook selectively disclosed unflattering information about its business prospects to privileged investors.
Facebook stock (NASDAQ:FB) tumbled as much as 50 percent after its debut.
Plaintiffs in at least 33 Facebook stock fraud lawsuits are asking the Court to hold Facebook and its underwriters responsible for their losses. They are seeking unspecified damages, which could cost Facebook millions of dollars.
Facebook has said that it did not violate any rules and that NASDAQ was to blame for trading glitches on the day of the offering. Separate Facebook investor class action lawsuits have been filed against NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. alleging it negligently failed to execute trades during the record-breaking Facebook IPO.
The newly consolidated case is In Re: Facebook Inc., IPO Securities and Derivative Litigation, Case No. 12-md-2389, U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
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Most Facebook users know this surveillance arm of social media and that is why they do not comment or post controversial memes and article often----so we have adapted to this idea of employers seeing our posts----connections with FB friends that may have the NSA trailing----if we thought of all this Americans would not be able to communicate at all these days.
Here we see this concern in the US but also in other nations as the WikiLeaks network made public the extent of industrial and personal espionage happening AND NO ONE LIKES THIS---OVERSEAS OR IN THE US. All the national press on this issue these few years after the exposure entailed Obama and Congress placing some sort of policy in place to protect citizens but we all know there is no oversight and accountability and therefore it is all still happening. Again, it is another public private partnership that has telecommunications completely controlled by global corporations that has the American people unable to secure their rights as citizens and Wall Street global pols simply passing more and more laws to deregulate and consolidate these groups into larger monopolies----the goal will be to have one massive CORPORATE STATE TELECOM LIKE MEXICO AND SLIM.
This is where securing space on US city conduits for telecommunications protecting individual citizen and small business access with oversight and accountability is critical.
All of this is simply part of building the SMART CITY infrastructure and when candidates for Mayor of Baltimore promote Silicon Valley technology corporations as they all do ---this is tied to the surveillance network.
Don’t Listen to Google and Facebook: The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership Is Still Going Strong
And real corporate security is still impossible.
A surveillance camera outside Google's China headquarters in 2010 Jason Lee / Reuters
Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from your computer or phone, and between data centers. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg personally called President Obama to complain about the NSA using Facebook as a means to hack computers, and Facebook's Chief Security Officer explained to reporters that the attack technique has not worked since last summer. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and others are now regularly publishing "transparency reports," listing approximately how many government data requests the companies have received and complied with.
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From US citizens learning the ever increasing fewest ways to use texting space to the rise of hashtag-----Wall Street follows Facebook and phone texting with Twitter and each time Americans are being tied to minimalist communications. Our language has been truncated into this global rush to texting with the least amount of letters and as everyone sees----even texting package costs are rising---
The American people now understand that Wall Street rolls out new corporations often tied to creating these new 21st century structures and that includes ending the first world access to communications and citizen voice----and they are doing this through social media and increasing loss of access----decline of citizen journalism----
Think about the movement of citizen communications over these few decades and you see we are slowly losing connections with our language----with our ability to express ourselves broadly and with depth----and as one social media goes out of business--the next one lowers us to hashtags and minimalist texting----WAKE UP FOLKS. Keep in mind this same thing is happening in International Economic Zones around the world----citizens in China---Latin America----Middle-East----all being moved from local communications models to this same texting, hashtag, SMART PHONE format.
Rise of the Hashtag: How the Humble #Hash Sign Is Taking Over Social Media
by Dave Awl
The @ sign needs to watch its back if it wants to hold on to its status as the most influential keyboard character of the Internet age. Yon hash sign (#) has a lean and hungry look.
In fact, Facebook’s long-awaited announcement earlier this month that hashtags are now active and clickable on Facebook means that hashtags now work on all of the major social media sites—including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, and more.
But it doesn’t stop there. Hashtags have become so pervasive that their reach extends beyond the online conversations that birthed them, popping up in TV shows and movies and even becoming a factor in political campaigns.
Figure 1: Comedian Stephen Colbert makes the hash sign with his fingers.
So this seems like a good time to look at the rise of the hashtag—from its humble beginnings on Twitter to its current status as a force in pop culture and politics, as well as how it functions as a tool for marketing and branding. We’ll look at some tips for creating your own hashtags and using them effectively, too.
What the Heck Are Hashtags, Anyway?A couple of days after Facebook announced the arrival of hashtags, a panicked friend of mine posted: “Since Facebook is the only social media I use, I’ve remained blissfully uneducated on all the mechanics of hashtags. Now that they’re coming to Facebook, will I have to lose my innocence?”
I reassured her that hashtags are easy to understand—their bark is much worse than their bite. So let’s start with a quick definition for those who, like my friend, have been holding on to their hashginity.
Hashtags are a way of organizing conversations and making them easier to follow. They work a little bit like keywords that give you an easy way to view recent postings on a specific topic—and a way to make sure your own contributions show up in that stream of postings, too.
At its simplest, a hashtag is simply a string of characters preceded by the hash sign: #. So, for example, #typography is a hashtag. #InDesign is a hashtag. #CreativePro is a hashtag.
When you see a hashtag on any of the sites where hashtags work, all you have to do is click on it and you’ll be taken to a search listing that shows the most recent postings that include that tag.
Maybe you want to see what people outside your own set of friends are saying about the latest episode of #MadMen or #DoctorWho, or a developing news story like the current situation in #Syria, or what’s happening at a conference like the #MacWorldExpo or #WWDC. You could click on those tags to get a sense of the buzz.
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WHEN SOCIETIES LOSE THEIR LANGUAGE---THEY SOON LOSE THE CULTURE---LOOK HOW HARD THE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO KEEP THEIR LANGUAGES ALIVE.
Many Americans think academics steeped in language and usage are being elite and stylistic language is useless. I am guilty in loving written language. What we need to do is look beyond all the technical issues of grammar or punctuation and think about language making citizens unique----the US uses a form of English language but it is uniquely different---and English has over decades been the global language so other nations learned English to communicate with one another. We are being told the US is in decline----the national debt of $20 trillion with a coming bond market collapse will no doubt be the nail in the coffin of the US dollar being the world's currency and Wall Street, the FED, and Obama/Congress created this debt deliberately. It looks like they are moving to make our US currency irrelevant. Now think about English as that global language-----what is happening when around the world people are using this truncated texting and tweeting of the American language? It is killing our American language and moving to create a global language----a ONE WORLD LANGUAGE.
Remember, Wall Street global pols designated US cities as International Economic Zones and are trying hard to install Trans Pacific Trade Pact so our US cities will operate AUTONOMOUSLY ----without any regard to US Constitutional law---Federal, state, or local law----and operate as all other International Economic Zones around the world do under this TPP-----global corporate tribunal rule----so they are eliminating what it means to be American----and creating in the US simply autonomous economic zones ALL OF WHICH WILL MAKE A COLONIAL ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF US CITIES LIKE BALTIMORE. Global pols are eliminating all that is American -----currency, language, laws, culture, education----to meld this 21ST CENTURY ONE WORLD MODEL.
This idea is complex for many folks not following public policy but many Americans are seeing this happening---and WE THE PEOPLE will not be citizens with rights if this dismantling of all that is America continues.
The death of language?
By Tom Colls
Today programme
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?
In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.
Far from inspiring the world to act, the issue is still on the margins, according to prominent French linguist Claude Hagege.
"Most people are not at all interested in the death of languages," he says. "If we are not cautious about the way English is progressing it may eventually kill most other languages."
According to Ethnologue, a US organisation owned by Christian group SIL International that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.
The death in 2008 of Chief Marie Smith Jones signalled her language's death
Among the ranks are the two known speakers of Lipan Apache alive in the US, four speakers of Totoro in Colombia and the single Bikya speaker in Cameroon.
"It is difficult to provide an accurate count," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis. "But we are at a tipping point. From here on we are going to increasingly see the number of languages going down."
What is lost?
As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?
WAR OF WORDS
6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population
The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people
SOURCE: Ethnologue"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."
For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.
Cross words
The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?
One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers "have changed to points of no return".
The story of Babel bestowed great power on societies with one language
As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists' sake than for the communities themselves.
Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.
This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.
"There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something," he says.
What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.
An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.
"We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population," he says.
Babbling away
Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Maori in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.
Hebrew was successfully revived from a written to a living language
Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say "I love you" and "pass the salt" - the French linguists' criteria for detecting life.
But with the "strong will" of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.
Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.
But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.
"You've got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.
"We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation."
Do you think the world's languages should be preserved? Are you a member of a community trying to keep your language alive? Here are a selection of your comments.
Each language is a seed-bed for poetic expression - that can capture some thing beyond mere communication. Every time a language is lost the "genetic basis" for such poetry is less rich.
Gavin Brelstaff, Alghero, Sardinia
At least we have come a long way from the times when languages were repressed and forbidden in favor of the language of the dominant polical or colonial power. But I believe that the matter of preserving declining languages should best be left to private iniative among those who have a personal interest in seeing them preserved.
Paul Kachur, Oberheimbach, Germany
I'm a sociolinguist specializing in endangered languages and language planning. I'm Italian and in my country over 40 historical languages are spoken, but most of them are endangered, particularly those which are are known as 'dialects'. This applies to the area where I was born as well, Milan. Milanese (which is as different from Italian as, say, Spanish is) is highly endangered and nothing is being done to promote it. In Brunei, too, where I live and work (I'm a lecturer at the local university), at least 9 out of the 11 local minority languages are endangered, some only slightly (like Iban for example), some severely (like Belait). Here, too, nothing is being done to preserve them...
Paolo Coluzzi, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam
I believe that all languages are unique and helps to identfy who we are as a people and as an individual. It is unfortunate that most languages are on the verge of dying but thats the price of progress.
Namron, Barbados
The flip side of the revival of Hebrew, which the article doesn't mention, is the probably imminent demise of Yiddish and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), two previously vibrant Jewish languages (New York City once had seven Yiddish newspapers!). The movement to transform Hebrew from a liturgical language into the national language of Israel had as much to do with 19th-century Zionist romanticism as anything else. Yiddish and Ladino were considered ghetto languages by Zionist intellectuals, and so not only not worthy of preservation, but deserving of oblivion. Early Jewish immigrants to Palestine and later Israel, for example, were encouraged to discard their "ghetto" names and take Hebrew ones; the speaking of languages other than Hebrew (but especially Yiddish) was actively discouraged. So is the result the triumphant revival of a dead language, or the loss of a thousand years of the Jewish experience in Europe?
MD, Canterbury, UK
The utility of a single global language, spoken by everyone as their mother tongue, would surely outweigh any loss of cultural heritage. The proliferation of Scots Gaelic bilingual signs in areas without Gaelic speakers (Aberdeenshire?!) is eccentric to say the least. Let languages die their natural deaths -there are plenty left.
Danny McShane, Aberdeen
Native Irish speaker and I have almost lost it. Government spending millions promoting same. Very difficult against TV and reading almost exclusively English. Endangered languages should be archived and let go.
Charles Mc Fadden, London England
Its sad when a language dies out, but it is unavoidable isn't it? If not by suddenly no longer being used, it will happen simply due to the language changing slowly over time. The 'English' that exists today is very different from a thousand years ago and from what will be in a thousand years.History is littered with languages which no longer exist.
Nik, London, U.K
Absolutely; language is intrinsicly linked between culture and ethnisity. Preserving the language is preserving the history and identity of a specific people. My own language is closely linked with Illyrian and I can make out some ancient etruscan, messapian, macedonian,thracian, and egyptian words and phrases because of it. It is absolutely amazing that my langugae was able to survive the influx of greek and slavic/mongolian invasion.
Anne Gillette, New York
I have studied languages reconstructed completely from written records, and know first-hand the enormous scholarly value in preserving languages. But languages are not here for our intellectual amusement. The economic and social benefits of fewer languages to the living world are clear - that's why it's happening. People should not be made to feel guilty about releasing past traditions, linguistic or otherwise. They do not live in a museum. Rather than diminishing a person's sense of self-worth by telling them that they are bad for giving up old traditions, maybe they should be lauded for not being trapped in the past, and shown their intrinsic value as human beings regardless of the culture in which they partake!
Scott, San Francisco, USA
When a language dies, a way of thinking dies with it. Some Native American languages have completely different concepts of past and present embedded in their language. Russian verbs offer a variety of ways to express actions, that Hebrew doesn't have, but Hebrew has a way of expressing actions that a person does for others that doesn't exist in Russian. Romance languages have well-defined ways to express things that should happen, but not necessarily do - a trait not found in every language. This list could go on forever.
Amir E. Aharoni, Jerusalem, Israel
I think that the reduction in the number of languages spoken is also a great way to help unify the world and the human race in general. How can we expect cultures to keep peace between each other when they cannot understand each other? Having one, or a few global languages will make things much more convenient and seamless. Also languages isolate communities. Which are most likely to be economically weak. 'Our heritage' is only history, and history will never and can never be more important than the present or the future.
Parsa, UK
No, languages naturally evolve, Professor Salikoko Mufwene is absolutely right when he says that asking groups to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists' sake than for the communities themselves. Communities are best served by a language which can be used to communicate intelligibly with the greatest number of people. It would seem to me that the fewer the number of languages, the fewer the chances for misunderstanding one another. The revival of dead or minority languages such as those mentioned in the article is an affectation at best and insular at worst. Even if people no longer communicated with one another using these minor languages that does not mean that knowledge of these minor languages would be gone. After all, no one now speaks Latin, but the language itself is not lost.
Alex McCallum, Airdrie, Scotland
Most of the problems in the world stem from a lack of communications. If we all spoke English then these problems might disapear. It may be sad to lose other languages, but we must strive for one universal language.
Ray Dorrity, Lymington, Hampshire
When a language disappears, the knowledge and thought that has been stored in the language through generations of use, disappears with it. With the growth of powerful and widespread world languages, such as English, Chinese and Spanish, it will be necessary to take steps to protect linguistic diversity, in order to ensure the survival of smaller languages.
Shouvik Datta, Orpington, Kent, United Kingdom
If we as human beings can all communicate in the same tongue, then maybe we will start to treat the whole polulation od the world equally and that can be no bad thing!
David Evans, Frinton on Sea, Essex
Not only is the death of languages a natural thing, it's also a good thing. 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' wrote Wittgenstein. By that he meant if you can't describe an object or a concept in a language, then you can't think about it or engage with it. Concepts of parliamentary democracy, the liberal economy or multicultural societies cannot be expressed in Mayan or Navajo or even Latin. It's one of the reasons they're dead while English-speaking societies thrive and prosper around from the world.
Alex Clarke, Brora, Highlands
I grew up speaking a German dialect, and didn't speak English until I went to school. My father always asked us if we were richer having two dollars or one dollar. He said the same was true of language.
Eugenia Bostwick, Pinckney, Mi, USA
A good proverb: A house divided against itself cannot stand. The Earth is the home of humans, plants, animals, various forms of life. Right now we humans have divide this home of ours' into divided nations, languages, religions, etc. In this time and age we need unity more than divisions. What is the point of having hundreds of languages that will make it difficult for people from different places to communicate.
A Lwin, Geneva, Switzerland
Every word has stories woven through it. When we lose a language, we lose so many words and stories. I'd like them to be remembered somehow.
Steve Rpe, Woodinville, USA
Languages that are dying out should just be catalogued for the interests of linguists, but communities shouldn't be forced to use it, and at the very most it should be taught to the next generation as a secondary language, much like Welsh is in Wales.
James Turner, Cardiff, Wales
That leaves text messaging which is already what many of the low-income citizens have already been pushed to----more US citizens moved to poverty with this coming economic crash will be in the same boat. Also as I mentioned earlier---here in Baltimore we are already seeing high-speed internet being dominated by global corporations and their overseas connections taking all our high-speed internet access---dropped phone calls---no video streaming with WiFi----are early signs.
THIS IS WHY WALL STREET HAS NATIONAL MEDIA ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT TWEETING AND GETTING THE LOCAL LEADERS TALKING ABOUT IT TOO.
'On Twitter, DeRay McKesson is the man. Followed by Beyonce, he regularly exchanges tweets with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and posts selfies with celebrities in between inspirational sonnets and black fist emojis.
His television interviews with Wolf Blitzer, on several shows on Comedy Central, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert were widely shared and celebrated by many.
BLACK LIVES MATTER LEADER RUNNING FOR BALTIMORE MAYOR
He's wicked smart, casts a great image, is ambitious, and is clearly not afraid of the camera.
All of that said, if he could've run for Mayor of Twitter, he would've likely been competitive. Mayor of Baltimore? Not so much'.
Rawlings-Blake named top U.S. mayor on Twitter
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that she will not seek re-election as Mayor for the city of Baltimore. She stated that she is going to spend her remaining 15 months as Mayor focusing on the recovery efforts since the Freddie Gray unrest.
Colin CampbellContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
Report says Baltimore's mayor is the best — at TwitterBaltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who decided not to run for re-election this year, was named the top mayor in the U.S. on Twitter in a report Tuesday by an international marketing firm.
In the report, Development Counsellors International examined the Twitter use of the mayors of the 250 largest U.S. cities, and ranked them by audience, frequency, responsiveness, engagement and influence.
"Twitter has emerged as a powerful tool for mayors to interact with citizens on a daily basis and actively listen to views outside of their inner circle," said Andy Levine, the firm's president. "Our aim was to highlight the 'jedi masters' of this important communications tool."
Rawlings-Blake said she was proud of the recognition.
"We have worked hard to leverage the power of 140 characters to create an important communication tool that has connected me to Baltimore City in new ways," she said in a statement.
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Zuckerberg was of course outed in national media for QUESTIONABLE public listing tactics when he waited until AFTER all Facebook most profitable years in the US to take the corporation public knowing those main street investors would be on the downward value side of Facebook stock. It was illegal because he ignored standard practices and was allowed to get away with it as usual. The idea was to expand Facebook globally to make it more profitable and they have had success for a decade globally but here is the catch-------nations around the world are seeing Facebook as a US surveillance tool and are now starting to create their own national versions of Facebook and pushing US Facebook out of many national markets. This will continue and drive Facebook profit down and down. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has long ago DIVESTED all those billions made from Facebook into other global corporations and really has no vested interest in keeping Facebook floating----this article shows the decline of Facebook globally-----and we will see social media like My Space and Facebook disappear as Americans like me have much of our business and communications tied to it. This is why broad based small business media is CRITICAL----print media, radio, TV because internet access is going, going, gone.
I keep my website page and blog to add diversity with NO STREAMING VIDEO for this reason---but even that will be compromised if citizens cannot afford to access the internet. If you have a website business you need to look at this because if you have streaming video attached to that webpage it will not open.
Is Facebook Losing Teens?
Written by Sebastian Hedencrona on Friday, November 8 2013
Yes, Facebook is losing teens.
As far as GlobalWebIndex is concerned, the biggest news from Facebook’s Q3 earnings call last week was a statement by Facebook’s CFO, David Ebersam, where he said engagement among teens was declining, and Facebook itself is having a hard time measuring the decline.
Here is an excerpt of his comments: "this is a hard issue for us to measure ... we've developed other analytic methods. ... our best announcement on youth usage [is that] among U.S. teens was stable overall from Q2 to Q3 but we did see a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens." He also added that the decline was of “questionable significance”.
Facebook usage globally is something that GlobalWebIndex has been tracking for the past four years, and we thought it important to add some insight on Facebook’s popularity among teenagers, not only in the US, but around the world. Below are answers to three key points that will do just that:
1. “Are teens leaving Facebook?”
Firstly, it is important to understand how GlobalWebIndex defines active usage: users must have an account on Facebook as well as have “used or contributed to Facebook in the past month on any device.” This is a simple measure of active engagement that works very well in market research, something that is near impossible to track using passive data collection or analytics due to the issues with auto-logins, multiple devices and ghost accounts (an issue we explored in an earlier post). In short, it is easy for analytics to record users as active despite no actual human activity. Also, Facebook uses a very broad definition of “active” which includes signing in with a Facebook login on a third party site or clicking a “Like” button. These would likely not be recognised by a user as being active. For these reasons, we believe our market research approach provides the most accurate measure.
Moving back to the issue at hand, Chart 1 below tracks Facebook active usage among 16-19 year olds in the US vs. Global (our research covers 16-65 year olds in 32 countries) since Q2 2012.
What this clearly demonstrates is that just 56% of US teens claim to be active on Facebook in Q3 2013, down 35% from Q1 2013 (76%). This is a substantial decline but also one that is mirrored globally (excluding China).
So the answer to this is categorically yes. Facebook is losing teens all over the world from its peak in Q4 2012.
2. “Is Facebook close to ‘penetrated in the US’ amongst teens – as claimed by David Ebersam”?
GlobalWebIndex data shows that 89% of US teens and 88% of teens globally (excl. China) have an account on Facebook. This, one could argue, is near penetration.
3. Is the Facebook teen decline only a US phenomenon?
David Ebersam also alluded to the fact that this is only a US phenomenon. Chart 1 above shows that actually the global figures are similar. If we segment (chart 2 below) this by market, we get a clear context and can see that decline across 2013 amongst teens is much larger in other markets. The lowest levels of decline are in South Africa, Poland and Russia where adoption of Facebook has been a more recent phenomenon. However, some markets show substantially higher levels of decline, led by the Netherlands which has seen active user numbers fall by 52% y-o-y in Q2 2013. The Dutch are followed by Malaysia (-45%), France (-44%), Turkey (-43%) and Mexico (-35%), demonstrating that Facebook teen decline, global and happening on all continents.
What does this mean?
The key question we are asking internally is whether this slump is driven by seasonality in Facebook usage or is, in fact, a genuine slide in user numbers.
What is clear is that competition from other social media platforms is increasing, and as we can see users are adopting supplementary services that serve specific needs rather than switching to other platforms entirely. Mobile is a key driver of this change where built-in OS functions and applications make it very easy to use many different services, all of which focus on doing very specific tasks e.g Snapchat or Whatsapp.
Moving forward, we are tackling these questions in two ways. Firstly, the Stream Analyst team is investigating where teens are going if not to Facebook. Secondly, we are releasing the next wave of our Q4 data at the end of December 2013, which will enable us to better address the seasonality question.
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You will read about many nations blocking Facebook----censoring Facebook but you don't hear much about nations developing their own national version of Facebook to replace what will become a complete refusal to allow Facebook in other nations. The amount of money and time being placed into circumventing all this censuring has many around the world looking for different vehicles of global communications.
I have seen for a few years ordinary media outlets once having the Facebook Share icon no longer having it as it becomes harder and harder to share articles on Facebook----I have been copying and pasting them but as we know TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT seeks to make it illegal to copy the most basic of journalism including these kinds of articles. So, soon enough---if you cannot afford a subscription you will not receive information and that will be OVER 80% OF AMERICANS VERY SOON.
The Great Firewall Blocking Facebook In China
The Chinese government blocked access to Facebook across the entire country in July 2009 in a response to unrest.
12:43, UK, Tuesday 04 February 2014
Facebook mobile apps open in China, but they do not update
For many around the world, Facebook is part of everyday life.
It has 1.2 billion active users globally, 757 million of whom log on daily. Many more than that will have flirted with it over the past decade.
But Facebook remains beyond the reach of one fifth of the world's population - the 1.3 billion people of China.
The Chinese government blocked access to Facebook across the entire country in July 2009. Anyone who's visited China on holiday or for business will know: it just doesn't work.
Try to log on to it from a desktop and the page simply won't open. On smartphones, the app opens up but won't update.
China's government has little time for Mark Zuckerberg's vision
It is blocked, so the joke goes, by The Great Firewall of China.
Facebook falls into a category of websites that China's Communist leaders deem unsuitable for their population.
Others include Twitter and YouTube.
Even some Google searches (the sensitive ones: think Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan) are tripped up by the Great Firewall.
News organisations who upset the government find themselves sporadically blocked too. Current culprits include the New York Times and Bloomberg.
Somewhere in China, an army of censors with sophisticated equipment do the blocking and the monitoring.
There was a time when Chinese users could "poke" and "tag" as much as they wished. But in July 2009, riots in the country's far western Xinjiang Province between Muslim and Han Chinese communities put an end to it all.
Activists for Xinjiang's independence were found to have used Facebook to garner support.
Quickly, the government realised the potential power of Facebook to connect the aggrieved and rally the discontented right across the vast nation.
They also realised that they couldn't simply censor specific posts given that it's operated via servers outside China. The only answer therefore was to block it completely. They did the same with Twitter.
Last month, the Chinese Ambassador to the UK defended his government's censorship of websites in an interview on Sky News.
Homegrown alternatives like Weibo have grown in popularity. Their servers are in China and so that army of censors can delete specific posts which concern them.
There are ways to leap over the Great Firewall which are vital for those of us who live in China and use Facebook, Twitter and Google for work.
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used to trick computers and phones into thinking they are operating in another country. I use my VPN countless times every day.
China's not alone. The people of North Korea don't even have an internet.
The regime of Kim Jong-Un has developed its own 'intranet' - a mini and highly restricted version of the World Wide Web.
Curiously though, visitors to North Korea are able to use Facebook and Twitter, perhaps because of the less sophisticated nature of North Korean censors.
In Egypt, the 2011 revolution became known as the Facebook Revolution by those who attributed the overthrow of the government to activity on Facebook. The site was blocked for a few days.
Who'd have thought a website dreamt up by college students in Boston could, in just 10 years, grow quite so powerful?
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Just to refresh this IPO listing of Facebook came at the same time Americans were made aware of the massive Wall Street frauds. This article looks at how this IPO listing in one way was fraudulent but as well the process of allowing a small group of venture capitalists fund Facebook in its early climb to profit-making and then having them as major shareholders at this IPO listing taking most of that initial profit knowing Facebook stock values were going down hill was not legal as well. Main street investors came on board at an initial IPO value and started losing money right away.
From surveillance tool to IPO profit scam----we entered the 21st century economy model of profit anyway you can----as usual under Obama nothing never occurred---they took the money and expanded overseas.
Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO Flop Ever
After Facebook's disastrous debut, the preferred clients of big banks walked away with huge profits. How? Public documents and interviews with dozens of investment bankers and research analysts reveal that the Street caught wind of something the public didn't. The social network and the banks told half the story. Here is the other half.
Facebook IPO Lawsuits Consolidated in New York
By Sarah Pierce
Facebook investors won their motion to consolidate dozens of securities fraud lawsuits filed throughout the United States over the bungled Facebook IPO before a federal judge in New York. The social networking behemoth, NASDAQ exchange and Facebook’s underwriter’s face over 30 lawsuits seeking class-action status on behalf of Facebook investors who suffered major losses during the company’s initial public offering in May.
A panel of federal judges ordered the potential Facebook IPO class action lawsuits to be transferred to U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan. The move was requested by Facebook and the majority of investor Plaintiffs because witnesses, IPO evidence and the underwriter banks are located in New York. Only a few investors sought to keep their cases in California.
Investors allege in the potential Facebook IPO class action lawsuit that the company, its officers, directors and underwrites violated securities laws by making false and misleading statements in connection with the May 18 IPO, which was tarnished by technical glitches on the NASDAQ exchange and accusations that Facebook selectively disclosed unflattering information about its business prospects to privileged investors.
Facebook stock (NASDAQ:FB) tumbled as much as 50 percent after its debut.
Plaintiffs in at least 33 Facebook stock fraud lawsuits are asking the Court to hold Facebook and its underwriters responsible for their losses. They are seeking unspecified damages, which could cost Facebook millions of dollars.
Facebook has said that it did not violate any rules and that NASDAQ was to blame for trading glitches on the day of the offering. Separate Facebook investor class action lawsuits have been filed against NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. alleging it negligently failed to execute trades during the record-breaking Facebook IPO.
The newly consolidated case is In Re: Facebook Inc., IPO Securities and Derivative Litigation, Case No. 12-md-2389, U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
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Most Facebook users know this surveillance arm of social media and that is why they do not comment or post controversial memes and article often----so we have adapted to this idea of employers seeing our posts----connections with FB friends that may have the NSA trailing----if we thought of all this Americans would not be able to communicate at all these days.
Here we see this concern in the US but also in other nations as the WikiLeaks network made public the extent of industrial and personal espionage happening AND NO ONE LIKES THIS---OVERSEAS OR IN THE US. All the national press on this issue these few years after the exposure entailed Obama and Congress placing some sort of policy in place to protect citizens but we all know there is no oversight and accountability and therefore it is all still happening. Again, it is another public private partnership that has telecommunications completely controlled by global corporations that has the American people unable to secure their rights as citizens and Wall Street global pols simply passing more and more laws to deregulate and consolidate these groups into larger monopolies----the goal will be to have one massive CORPORATE STATE TELECOM LIKE MEXICO AND SLIM.
This is where securing space on US city conduits for telecommunications protecting individual citizen and small business access with oversight and accountability is critical.
All of this is simply part of building the SMART CITY infrastructure and when candidates for Mayor of Baltimore promote Silicon Valley technology corporations as they all do ---this is tied to the surveillance network.
Don’t Listen to Google and Facebook: The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership Is Still Going Strong
And real corporate security is still impossible.
A surveillance camera outside Google's China headquarters in 2010 Jason Lee / Reuters
- Bruce Schneier
- Mar 25, 2014
- Technology
Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from your computer or phone, and between data centers. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg personally called President Obama to complain about the NSA using Facebook as a means to hack computers, and Facebook's Chief Security Officer explained to reporters that the attack technique has not worked since last summer. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and others are now regularly publishing "transparency reports," listing approximately how many government data requests the companies have received and complied with.
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From US citizens learning the ever increasing fewest ways to use texting space to the rise of hashtag-----Wall Street follows Facebook and phone texting with Twitter and each time Americans are being tied to minimalist communications. Our language has been truncated into this global rush to texting with the least amount of letters and as everyone sees----even texting package costs are rising---
The American people now understand that Wall Street rolls out new corporations often tied to creating these new 21st century structures and that includes ending the first world access to communications and citizen voice----and they are doing this through social media and increasing loss of access----decline of citizen journalism----
Think about the movement of citizen communications over these few decades and you see we are slowly losing connections with our language----with our ability to express ourselves broadly and with depth----and as one social media goes out of business--the next one lowers us to hashtags and minimalist texting----WAKE UP FOLKS. Keep in mind this same thing is happening in International Economic Zones around the world----citizens in China---Latin America----Middle-East----all being moved from local communications models to this same texting, hashtag, SMART PHONE format.
Rise of the Hashtag: How the Humble #Hash Sign Is Taking Over Social Media
by Dave Awl
The @ sign needs to watch its back if it wants to hold on to its status as the most influential keyboard character of the Internet age. Yon hash sign (#) has a lean and hungry look.
In fact, Facebook’s long-awaited announcement earlier this month that hashtags are now active and clickable on Facebook means that hashtags now work on all of the major social media sites—including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, and more.
But it doesn’t stop there. Hashtags have become so pervasive that their reach extends beyond the online conversations that birthed them, popping up in TV shows and movies and even becoming a factor in political campaigns.
Figure 1: Comedian Stephen Colbert makes the hash sign with his fingers.
So this seems like a good time to look at the rise of the hashtag—from its humble beginnings on Twitter to its current status as a force in pop culture and politics, as well as how it functions as a tool for marketing and branding. We’ll look at some tips for creating your own hashtags and using them effectively, too.
What the Heck Are Hashtags, Anyway?A couple of days after Facebook announced the arrival of hashtags, a panicked friend of mine posted: “Since Facebook is the only social media I use, I’ve remained blissfully uneducated on all the mechanics of hashtags. Now that they’re coming to Facebook, will I have to lose my innocence?”
I reassured her that hashtags are easy to understand—their bark is much worse than their bite. So let’s start with a quick definition for those who, like my friend, have been holding on to their hashginity.
Hashtags are a way of organizing conversations and making them easier to follow. They work a little bit like keywords that give you an easy way to view recent postings on a specific topic—and a way to make sure your own contributions show up in that stream of postings, too.
At its simplest, a hashtag is simply a string of characters preceded by the hash sign: #. So, for example, #typography is a hashtag. #InDesign is a hashtag. #CreativePro is a hashtag.
When you see a hashtag on any of the sites where hashtags work, all you have to do is click on it and you’ll be taken to a search listing that shows the most recent postings that include that tag.
Maybe you want to see what people outside your own set of friends are saying about the latest episode of #MadMen or #DoctorWho, or a developing news story like the current situation in #Syria, or what’s happening at a conference like the #MacWorldExpo or #WWDC. You could click on those tags to get a sense of the buzz.
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WHEN SOCIETIES LOSE THEIR LANGUAGE---THEY SOON LOSE THE CULTURE---LOOK HOW HARD THE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO KEEP THEIR LANGUAGES ALIVE.
Many Americans think academics steeped in language and usage are being elite and stylistic language is useless. I am guilty in loving written language. What we need to do is look beyond all the technical issues of grammar or punctuation and think about language making citizens unique----the US uses a form of English language but it is uniquely different---and English has over decades been the global language so other nations learned English to communicate with one another. We are being told the US is in decline----the national debt of $20 trillion with a coming bond market collapse will no doubt be the nail in the coffin of the US dollar being the world's currency and Wall Street, the FED, and Obama/Congress created this debt deliberately. It looks like they are moving to make our US currency irrelevant. Now think about English as that global language-----what is happening when around the world people are using this truncated texting and tweeting of the American language? It is killing our American language and moving to create a global language----a ONE WORLD LANGUAGE.
Remember, Wall Street global pols designated US cities as International Economic Zones and are trying hard to install Trans Pacific Trade Pact so our US cities will operate AUTONOMOUSLY ----without any regard to US Constitutional law---Federal, state, or local law----and operate as all other International Economic Zones around the world do under this TPP-----global corporate tribunal rule----so they are eliminating what it means to be American----and creating in the US simply autonomous economic zones ALL OF WHICH WILL MAKE A COLONIAL ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF US CITIES LIKE BALTIMORE. Global pols are eliminating all that is American -----currency, language, laws, culture, education----to meld this 21ST CENTURY ONE WORLD MODEL.
This idea is complex for many folks not following public policy but many Americans are seeing this happening---and WE THE PEOPLE will not be citizens with rights if this dismantling of all that is America continues.
The death of language?
By Tom Colls
Today programme
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?
In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.
Far from inspiring the world to act, the issue is still on the margins, according to prominent French linguist Claude Hagege.
"Most people are not at all interested in the death of languages," he says. "If we are not cautious about the way English is progressing it may eventually kill most other languages."
According to Ethnologue, a US organisation owned by Christian group SIL International that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.
The death in 2008 of Chief Marie Smith Jones signalled her language's death
Among the ranks are the two known speakers of Lipan Apache alive in the US, four speakers of Totoro in Colombia and the single Bikya speaker in Cameroon.
"It is difficult to provide an accurate count," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis. "But we are at a tipping point. From here on we are going to increasingly see the number of languages going down."
What is lost?
As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?
WAR OF WORDS
6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population
The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people
SOURCE: Ethnologue"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."
For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.
Cross words
The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?
One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers "have changed to points of no return".
The story of Babel bestowed great power on societies with one language
As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists' sake than for the communities themselves.
Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.
This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.
"There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something," he says.
What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.
An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.
"We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population," he says.
Babbling away
Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Maori in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.
Hebrew was successfully revived from a written to a living language
Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say "I love you" and "pass the salt" - the French linguists' criteria for detecting life.
But with the "strong will" of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.
Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.
But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.
"You've got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.
"We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation."
Do you think the world's languages should be preserved? Are you a member of a community trying to keep your language alive? Here are a selection of your comments.
Each language is a seed-bed for poetic expression - that can capture some thing beyond mere communication. Every time a language is lost the "genetic basis" for such poetry is less rich.
Gavin Brelstaff, Alghero, Sardinia
At least we have come a long way from the times when languages were repressed and forbidden in favor of the language of the dominant polical or colonial power. But I believe that the matter of preserving declining languages should best be left to private iniative among those who have a personal interest in seeing them preserved.
Paul Kachur, Oberheimbach, Germany
I'm a sociolinguist specializing in endangered languages and language planning. I'm Italian and in my country over 40 historical languages are spoken, but most of them are endangered, particularly those which are are known as 'dialects'. This applies to the area where I was born as well, Milan. Milanese (which is as different from Italian as, say, Spanish is) is highly endangered and nothing is being done to promote it. In Brunei, too, where I live and work (I'm a lecturer at the local university), at least 9 out of the 11 local minority languages are endangered, some only slightly (like Iban for example), some severely (like Belait). Here, too, nothing is being done to preserve them...
Paolo Coluzzi, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam
I believe that all languages are unique and helps to identfy who we are as a people and as an individual. It is unfortunate that most languages are on the verge of dying but thats the price of progress.
Namron, Barbados
The flip side of the revival of Hebrew, which the article doesn't mention, is the probably imminent demise of Yiddish and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), two previously vibrant Jewish languages (New York City once had seven Yiddish newspapers!). The movement to transform Hebrew from a liturgical language into the national language of Israel had as much to do with 19th-century Zionist romanticism as anything else. Yiddish and Ladino were considered ghetto languages by Zionist intellectuals, and so not only not worthy of preservation, but deserving of oblivion. Early Jewish immigrants to Palestine and later Israel, for example, were encouraged to discard their "ghetto" names and take Hebrew ones; the speaking of languages other than Hebrew (but especially Yiddish) was actively discouraged. So is the result the triumphant revival of a dead language, or the loss of a thousand years of the Jewish experience in Europe?
MD, Canterbury, UK
The utility of a single global language, spoken by everyone as their mother tongue, would surely outweigh any loss of cultural heritage. The proliferation of Scots Gaelic bilingual signs in areas without Gaelic speakers (Aberdeenshire?!) is eccentric to say the least. Let languages die their natural deaths -there are plenty left.
Danny McShane, Aberdeen
Native Irish speaker and I have almost lost it. Government spending millions promoting same. Very difficult against TV and reading almost exclusively English. Endangered languages should be archived and let go.
Charles Mc Fadden, London England
Its sad when a language dies out, but it is unavoidable isn't it? If not by suddenly no longer being used, it will happen simply due to the language changing slowly over time. The 'English' that exists today is very different from a thousand years ago and from what will be in a thousand years.History is littered with languages which no longer exist.
Nik, London, U.K
Absolutely; language is intrinsicly linked between culture and ethnisity. Preserving the language is preserving the history and identity of a specific people. My own language is closely linked with Illyrian and I can make out some ancient etruscan, messapian, macedonian,thracian, and egyptian words and phrases because of it. It is absolutely amazing that my langugae was able to survive the influx of greek and slavic/mongolian invasion.
Anne Gillette, New York
I have studied languages reconstructed completely from written records, and know first-hand the enormous scholarly value in preserving languages. But languages are not here for our intellectual amusement. The economic and social benefits of fewer languages to the living world are clear - that's why it's happening. People should not be made to feel guilty about releasing past traditions, linguistic or otherwise. They do not live in a museum. Rather than diminishing a person's sense of self-worth by telling them that they are bad for giving up old traditions, maybe they should be lauded for not being trapped in the past, and shown their intrinsic value as human beings regardless of the culture in which they partake!
Scott, San Francisco, USA
When a language dies, a way of thinking dies with it. Some Native American languages have completely different concepts of past and present embedded in their language. Russian verbs offer a variety of ways to express actions, that Hebrew doesn't have, but Hebrew has a way of expressing actions that a person does for others that doesn't exist in Russian. Romance languages have well-defined ways to express things that should happen, but not necessarily do - a trait not found in every language. This list could go on forever.
Amir E. Aharoni, Jerusalem, Israel
I think that the reduction in the number of languages spoken is also a great way to help unify the world and the human race in general. How can we expect cultures to keep peace between each other when they cannot understand each other? Having one, or a few global languages will make things much more convenient and seamless. Also languages isolate communities. Which are most likely to be economically weak. 'Our heritage' is only history, and history will never and can never be more important than the present or the future.
Parsa, UK
No, languages naturally evolve, Professor Salikoko Mufwene is absolutely right when he says that asking groups to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists' sake than for the communities themselves. Communities are best served by a language which can be used to communicate intelligibly with the greatest number of people. It would seem to me that the fewer the number of languages, the fewer the chances for misunderstanding one another. The revival of dead or minority languages such as those mentioned in the article is an affectation at best and insular at worst. Even if people no longer communicated with one another using these minor languages that does not mean that knowledge of these minor languages would be gone. After all, no one now speaks Latin, but the language itself is not lost.
Alex McCallum, Airdrie, Scotland
Most of the problems in the world stem from a lack of communications. If we all spoke English then these problems might disapear. It may be sad to lose other languages, but we must strive for one universal language.
Ray Dorrity, Lymington, Hampshire
When a language disappears, the knowledge and thought that has been stored in the language through generations of use, disappears with it. With the growth of powerful and widespread world languages, such as English, Chinese and Spanish, it will be necessary to take steps to protect linguistic diversity, in order to ensure the survival of smaller languages.
Shouvik Datta, Orpington, Kent, United Kingdom
If we as human beings can all communicate in the same tongue, then maybe we will start to treat the whole polulation od the world equally and that can be no bad thing!
David Evans, Frinton on Sea, Essex
Not only is the death of languages a natural thing, it's also a good thing. 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' wrote Wittgenstein. By that he meant if you can't describe an object or a concept in a language, then you can't think about it or engage with it. Concepts of parliamentary democracy, the liberal economy or multicultural societies cannot be expressed in Mayan or Navajo or even Latin. It's one of the reasons they're dead while English-speaking societies thrive and prosper around from the world.
Alex Clarke, Brora, Highlands
I grew up speaking a German dialect, and didn't speak English until I went to school. My father always asked us if we were richer having two dollars or one dollar. He said the same was true of language.
Eugenia Bostwick, Pinckney, Mi, USA
A good proverb: A house divided against itself cannot stand. The Earth is the home of humans, plants, animals, various forms of life. Right now we humans have divide this home of ours' into divided nations, languages, religions, etc. In this time and age we need unity more than divisions. What is the point of having hundreds of languages that will make it difficult for people from different places to communicate.
A Lwin, Geneva, Switzerland
Every word has stories woven through it. When we lose a language, we lose so many words and stories. I'd like them to be remembered somehow.
Steve Rpe, Woodinville, USA
Languages that are dying out should just be catalogued for the interests of linguists, but communities shouldn't be forced to use it, and at the very most it should be taught to the next generation as a secondary language, much like Welsh is in Wales.
James Turner, Cardiff, Wales
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