Holton, H. 2014. The role of information technology in supporting minority and endangered languages. Cambridge Handbook of Language Endangerment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 371–399.

Lillehaugen, B. 2016. Why write in a language that (almost) no one can read? Twitter and the development of written literature. Language Documentation & Conservation, 10: 356–393.

O’Rourke, B. & F. Ramallo. 2011. The native-non-native dichotomy in minority language contexts: Comparisons between Irish and Galician. Language Problems & Language Planning, 35(2): 139–159.

Polinsky, M. 2019. Field stations for linguistic research: A blueprint of a sustainable model. Language, 95(2): e327–e338.

Zuckermann, G. 2020. Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zulato, A., Kasstan, J. & N. Nagy. 2018. An overview of Francoprovençal vitality in Europe and North America. IJSL, 249:11–29.

We discuss a citizen-sociolinguistic project to build digital bridges connecting several Mediterranean regions to each other and their North American diasporas. These bridges cross four countries whose boundaries delimit different national languages. They are united only in that small communities in each speak Francoprovençal, a highly fragmented, severely endangered, unstandardized language (Zulato et al. 2018). In such communities, we observe generational divides between younger less proficient speakers and older fluent speakers who see each other as socially and linguistically incompatible (cf. O’Rourke & Ramallo 2011:139). Electronically mediated communication (EMC) can alleviate such concerns and promote language revitalization (Holton 2014, Zuckermann 2020), including efforts among new language learners. EMC can foster virtual language communities in which speaker errors and innovations are less likely to trigger essentialist language ideologies than in traditional classroom and formal-writing settings. However, given EMC’s text-based nature, its benefits do not naturally accrue in communities without codified writing systems among speakers illiterate in their first language.

This talk describes a collaborative project among academic linguists and community members that is building an interactive e-platform to: (a) encourage speakers to share natural-speech and multimodal responses to task-based activities via computer/smart phone; (b) archive these responses; and (c) develop parallel corpora of speech and text responses. We argue that this holistic, community-driven approach to revitalization offers several advantages to speakers, which we illustrate using the case of Francoprovençal. First, such an approach brings into contact groups with differing degrees and types of linguistic (including orthographic) practices on both sides of the Atlantic. Interacting with readers who have different (or no) orthographic rules can abate concerns about writing a little-codified language “the wrong way”. Second, our activities will encourage and foster inter-generational, collaborative communication that links younger speakers with strong technical skills to older speakers with strong linguistic and cultural knowledge (e.g. through task-based activities). Third, these activities will introduce the language into modern domains of usage where younger community members tend to be much more active (Lillehaugen 2016). Finally, we argue that such an approach may foster a new generation of community linguists to undertake research on their own language. In this sense the project is a virtual adaptation of Polinsky (2019)’s ‘field stations’ model, offering a source of data that is valuable for investigating gradual codification/development of a writing system and patterns of variation that occur as participants engage (often for their first time) with speakers/texters from other varieties. Such advantages may bring insights for longer-term collaborative revitalization efforts.