Language revitalization on social media: Ten years in the Louisiana Creole Virtual Classroom

Abstract

Social media has long been recognized as an important domain for the maintenance of endangered and minoritized languages, as well as a platform for language activism. Based on a decade of participant observation in the Louisiana Creole Virtual Classroom, a revitalization community based on Facebook, this paper describes how speakers and learners of minoritized and endangered languages can form online communities for activism, resource development, learning and teaching. Louisiana Creole is critically endangered and has received little to no institutional support. Meanwhile, the Virtual Classroom has succeeded in creating a large number of new speakers through peer-mediated learning and the creation of learning resources. The orthography developed in the Virtual Classroom has now achieved widespread acceptance, as has the glossonym Kouri-Vini. Both are leveraged for the purposes of language making. The Virtual Classroom has given rise to an enduring revitalization movement with implications extending far beyond social media. Indeed, as this paper argues, scholars and practitioners should be cautious not to view online revitalization through a dichotomous lens which induces an artificial separation between the online and the offline. Online language revitalization, like its offline counterpart, is underpinned by language-ideological concerns which are evident in many of the shared practices of the Virtual Classroom.