Speak up! Add your voice to the indigenous language challenge

Here’s a challenge that doesn’t involve dumping ice water on your head, shaving the hair off your head or growing a mustache.

All you have to do is record a video of yourself speaking Inuktitut and post it on a Facebook page.

The Indigenous Language Challenge has invited all indigenous people to post videos of themselves speaking their traditional languages on its Facebook page, in a challenge that shows yet another use of social media beyond selling country foods or bartering a traditional amautik for hockey equipment.

“The challenge has taken off wonderfully,” says a description of the Indigenous Language Challenge on its Facebook page.

“Let’s use this particular group to share all of the language videos to inspire each other to SPEAK our languages.In the spirit of language revitalization, please post videos of yourselves speaking your beautiful Indigenous languages and encourage others to do the same.”

About 7,000 languages exist in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people each.

If you accept the Indigenous Language Challenge, you must record a video of you or someone else speaking an indigenous language and tap someone else to do the same.

Among the many posts on the Challenge’s Facebook page, you can hear Diamond Digosdayi Rock sing the United States national anthem in Cherokee or Daniel Kauwila Mahi introduce himself in Hawaiian — “Aloha everybody, my name is Daniel Kauwila Mahi. Iʻm from Honolulu.”

Twelve-year-old old twin boys speak N’dem, the Apache language.

“They were a little nervous,” their mother comments in the post. “I was so proud of my son Korbyn when his teacher had a speaker come in to talk to their class about native Americans. The lady was white and when he piped up and tried to talk about his people she was very dismissive until he started speaking Lipan to her. His teacher was so excited she took him to all the other classrooms in his grade so they could hear an indigenous language.”

You can also listen Brenton Tristin Rexford‎ speaking “the language of the Inupiaq people of the North Slope in Alaska within the Arctic Circle.”

And “I’m still a student of Nahuatl. However, I speak it well enough to create many sentences,” says Diego JV of California of that Mayan language.

On the Facebook page you can see videos of indigenous languages from around the world.

“Hey everyone, I work at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, WA, Australia. We’re working towards revitalising the Miriwoong language which has fewer than 12 fluent speakers remaining and is listed as critically endangered,” says Matthew Reginald Keast in his Facebook post.

“We all love the the Indigenous Language Challenge so we got together to each say ‘Woorlab ngenandayin Miriwoong!’ ‘I am speaking Miriwoong!’ and as a group ‘Woorlab yarroondayan Miriwoong!’ ‘We are all speaking Miriwoong!'”