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Scoop.it!
Evolutionary biologists say the first speakers of what would become the Indo-European languages were probably farmers in what is now Turkey — a conclusion that differs by hundreds of miles and thousands of years from a longstanding linguistic theory.
This research potentially can explain much about the geography of languages and the distribution of cultural groups in Eurasia. 
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Like a detective at a crime scene, chief language inspector Antons Kursitis scans the lobby of a hotel in downtown Riga. He spots a brochure that lists hotel services in Russian only, a flagrant violation of Latvia's language laws.
"Protecting the Latvian language — that is, safeguarding its supremacy over Russian — has been a priority here since the Soviet occupation ended two decades ago. Those efforts face their biggest test yet on Saturday, in a referendum on whether to make Russian the country's second official language." What historical, political and demographic factors shape this cultural issue of language? Why is language often seen as so crucial to cultural identity?
The Latvian voters have spoken: in a massive voter turn-out, they struck down the referendum that sought to make Russian an official language. "Latvia is the only place throughout the world where Latvian is spoken, so we have to protect it," said Martins Dzerve, 37, in Riga, Latvia's capital. "But Russian is everywhere." For more on the vote, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17083397
Jason Schneider's curator insight,
March 5, 2015 4:54 PM
About 35 percent of Latvia's population (5,000,000) contains Russian ancestors. Russia does not want to give Latvia credit for practicing Russian languages and the Russian heritage because Russian feels like since they take up about 11% of the world, they don't need to share their heritage with any other country. It's kind of like copyright laws that Russia seems to have. 
Martin Kemp's curator insight,
December 17, 2015 1:37 PM
this article is great. the latvians are doing the right thing. in the place you live and where you are from, the people should speak your language and follow your rules. you should be worried about what the native people want and not what others want. be proud of your culture and preserve it. |
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One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s a global conversation anyone can join anytime. Eavesdropping on the world, what what!
While many educators have been using http://popvssoda.com/ to show the linguistic regions in the United States, this is a similar map, with the added social media component. To map out these regions, the cartographer used the word choice on geo-tagged tweets as the data source. For another twitter, map, the following link shows which regions are most actively engaged on Twitter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/06/top-countries-on-twitter_n_1653915.html What do these regions show us? What types of regions are these?
Seth: This is a fun site!
Courtney Burns's curator insight,
September 14, 2013 10:35 PM
Twitter is something that is becoming widely used, and is something I usually check everyday. I never really thought of twitter beyond advertising and communicating. It is amazing the kind of data that can be extracted from peoples tweets. In the soda vs. pop argument I would say soda which makes sense since the data shows that people in the Northeast refer to it as soda. Twitter is so current that you can actually get some current and accurate data just from reading the hash tags in peoples tweets. It's amazing that such information can be extracted from all around the world.
Scoop.it!
Kazuo Ueda toiled quietly in southern Japan for two decades in a quest both impressive and quixotic: compiling the world's first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary.
This is a fascinating podcast demonstrating cross-cultural interactions. Who would have ever imagined a Japanese-Yiddish dicitionary?
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