The eighth most active language in the blogosphere: Catalan

Saturday, October 17, 2009

That's from an article here in Spanish. The article doesn't give a source for the claim that Catalan is the eighth most active language on the blogosphere and a quick scan over the site mentioned in the article doesn't show the number (it might be buried in there somewhere; the site is in a lot of languages) but it's definitely true that Catalan has a very large presence online compared to its population and lack of an independent country of its own besides tiny Andorra.

Catalan is the eighth most active language in the world in terms of activity on blogs and the 15th on Wikipedia, the popular electronic encyclopedia, which attests to "an online presence much greater than its demographic weight with 10 million speakers".

The director of Linguamón-Casa de les Llengües, Antoni Mir, is confident that Catalan enjoys "good health" on the internet. Mir, who inaugurated the 1th International Symposium on Multilinguism and Cyberspace, emphasized that this large activity of Catalan online is much greater than the demographic weight than 10 million Catalan speakers represent.

Mir believes that the Internet will not again ever be an exclusive territory to English as the internet opens incredible doors to multilinguism, and adds that there has been an explosion in minority languages online. The director of Casa de les Llengües is encouraged that Catalan occupies new spaces which are being created online, such as YouTube and social networks.

One example of Catalan showing up on YouTube out of nowhere can be seen here. Every once in a while one will see Catalan pop up when you least expect it.

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