Countering Digital Diglossia

Coppieters Foundation and  Fundació Irla are happy to present this new paper, result of the effort of the author Montserrat Sendra.

About the content: Teenagers spend ever more time on the internet, to the point that chatting and surfing the internet—80%—has overtaken other leisure activities such as spending time with friends—66%, playing video games—64%, or playing sports—49%. Through Instagram—81.6%, YouTube—58.9%, or TikTok—55.6%, they follow different content creator profiles. These Instagrammers, YouTubers, and influencers contribute to the formation of social imaginaries and mental frameworks and become models of social and linguistic behaviour. Thus, one in three young people would like to be an influencer and one in three would like to pursue a career related to IT. This great impact of the networks worries communities with minoritized languages, since most of the digital content is produced and consumed in the major world languages —English, Spanish or French. Since the speakers of the minority languages usually master one of the hegemonic languages, they tend to consume and produce content in the majority language, which causes so-called digital diglossia and may represent a threat to the survival of non-hegemonic. To counteract this, some public institutions have begun to carry out studies and actions to promote the use of their languages online.

The aim of this study is to analyse different strategies for promoting the presence of minoritized languages in the digital world, compare them, and synthesize the information as recommendations and good practices for these communities.

The results of this research can be useful for most nonhegemonic world languages, to encourage the production of content in the digital sphere and thus contribute to the future linguistic sustainability of these communities.

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This paper is financially supported by the European Parliament. The European Parliament is not liable for the content of the event nor the opinions of the speakers.

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This is a joint event of Coppieters Foundation and Fundació Irla.

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Cover Photo by Denis Sebastian Tamas

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