🔰: A simple proposal for increasing social media use by language learners

Breaking the spiral of silence for minority languages with an emoji

Last year, William J. Moner and I asked several hundred Irish people — mostly secondary and university students, and learners of Irish as a second language— about how they used the Irish language in social media. One of our findings is that many learners avoid using their language in public social media. Learners are more likely to use their Irish in private contexts such as a personal exchange on WhatsApp than in public contexts such as a Twitter or Instagram post. Restricting the use of a language to private contexts is likely to contribute to a feedback loop similar to the “spiral of silence.”

The spiral of silence refers to a theory in political and mass communication that people regulate their own expressions of opinions based on their perceptions of “mainstream” or “popular” opinion. If one perceives that her opinion is unpopular, she is less likely to voice it publicly. This results in an actual reduction of that opinion in the public sphere, leading others who share the opinion to remain silent. This feedback loop expands and intensifies until the opinion has been largely eliminated. While the spiral of silence is typically applied to political opinions, an analogous process is perhaps at work for people communicating in multilingual environments.

This process could be especially significant for the digital use of minority languages like Irish, and for speakers and learners who are less confident in their writing abilities.

Social media represent a critical domain for language use, and a useful low-stakes context for casual writing and interaction. Yet people who want to use a minority language in social media face specific social and cultural challenges. Many Irish learners, for example, feel that public social media exposes them to “linguistic gatekeepers” — native speakers or more advanced learners who would publicly critique their Irish language use. As we noted:

Several participants suggested that they feared criticism of their Irish from others in their network (“Grammar [snobs] that knock the confidence of learners when they do use the language publicly” and “the snobbishness of more fluent speakers”), or, alternately, criticism for using the language at all (“the stigma about using Irish.”)

Who are the “grammar snobs”? It’s conceivable that some fluent speakers of minority languages “correct” the language of others in their social media networks out of malice. Yet it seems much more likely that such “gatekeepers” are acting out of a sense of duty to either the language itself or the culture it represents. While having one’s Twitter grammar corrected by a stranger would be perceived as insulting or humiliating in some cases, in others it might be understood as a valuable learning opportunity. In most minority language contexts, linguistic expertise is a limited resource, so its productive application should be prioritized.

What is needed is a way to signal an interest in receiving critique of one’s language use to friends and strangers in the network. Thus, a proposal:

🔰

Language learners could tag their own posts or profiles with an emoji that communicates this willingness. When I include a 🔰 in my post, I would be signalling:

I’m a learner of this language.

I want to improve.

I welcome polite, constructive feedback and critique.

Including a tag removes one type of ambiguity from the interaction. Since emoji are searchable on most social media platforms, it makes learners more visible to each other, and to those who want to assist them. It is unobtrusive and unlikely to distract from content.

Crucially, it clarifies when feedback is desired and will be appreciated, reducing one of the primary online social perils for language learners.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what the emoji tag is, as long as a community has a shared understanding of its meaning. 🔰 (Unicode character U+1F530) is the shoshinsha mark or wakaba mark, and is displayed on the cars of new Japanese drivers. Relatively abstract and seemingly without an specific existing online use, it could be one appropriate option. Perhaps there is a better one. Perhaps the learner tag should be paired with a language hashtag, like #gaeilge or #ᏣᎳᎩ, to facilitate discovery.

Posting on social media is a type of public performance, and the anxiety that language learners experience in such performances is well understood by language teachers. Not-yet-fluent learners are a critically important contingent of many minority language communities, and should be supported in their efforts to use their language in social media.

A clarification of when public critique of language use is appropriate could encourage more learners to share their voices online.