ILAT goes NYT...

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Greetings folks,

ILAT got a nice shout out from the New York Times today!

"An Internet discussion group, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is
full of announcements for new software to build sound dictionaries and
a project to collect tweets in Tok Pisin, a creole language spoken
throughout Papua New Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El
Salvador."

~~~

Everyone Speaks Text Message

By TINA ROSENBERG
Published: December 9, 2011

When Ibrahima Traore takes his sons to a park in Montclair, N.J., he
often sits on a bench and reads. He reads English, French and Arabic,
but most of the time he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers of those
languages would recognize. N’Ko is the standardized writing system for
Mande languages, a family of closely related tongues — among them
Traore’s language of Mandinka, but also Jula, Bamana, Koyaga, Marka —
spoken, for the most part, in eight West African countries, by some 35
million people. N’Ko looks like a cross between Arabic and ancient
Norse runes, written from right to left in a blocky script with the
letters connected underneath. Traore types e-mail to his family on his
laptop in N’Ko, works on his Web site in N’Ko, tweets in N’Ko on his
iPhone and iPad and reads books and newspapers written in N’Ko to
prepare for the N’Ko classes he teaches in the Bronx and for his
appearances on an Internet radio program to discuss cultural issues
around the use of N’Ko.

Access full article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/magazine/everyone-speaks-text-message.html