[LINK] "Russia Recognizes Independence of Georgian Regions"

From Bloomberg comes Sebastian Alison and Lyubov Pronina's article "Russia Recognizes Independence of Georgian Regions".

Russia recognized the independence of Georgia's breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, deepening a rift with the West and striking a blow against NATO's eastward expansion.

``I signed decrees on the recognition by the Russian Federation of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,'' President Dmitry Medvedev said on television from Sochi today. ``Russia calls on other states to follow its example.''

Western governments condemned the move. The U.K. Foreign Office ``categorically'' rejected it, while the U.S. called it ``not helpful.'' Italy and France expressed regret. German Chancellor Angela Merkel described it as ``absolutely unacceptable,'' and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt termed the move a ``deliberate violation of international law.''

Russia's recognition of the two regions stems from its military rout of Georgia, which came this month in response to a Georgian operation to retake South Ossetia. It echoes the West's establishment of ties to Kosovo in February, a step Russia bitterly opposed after the enclave broke away from Serbia, a Russian ally. U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday urged Medvedev not to grant the regions recognition.

Medvedev's statement at his summer residence in Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics about 100 kilometers (62 miles) along the Black Sea coast from the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi, followed a unanimous call by Russia's parliament yesterday to back the enclaves' aspirations for statehood.

[. . .]

South Ossetia, less than half the size of Kosovo, has a population of about 70,000. Russian officials say 2,100 civilians died in recent fighting in the region, which is connected to Russia via a tunnel through the Caucasus Mountains.

Slightly smaller than Cyprus, Abkhazia has about 200,000 people. Georgia says about 250,000 ethnic Georgians fled a war there in the early 1990s and haven't been allowed to return.

[AH] Alistair MacDiarmid, Language Revitalization in Cape Breton

Imagine a world where Canada had three official languages.

* * *

Alistair MacDiarmid's new Language Revitalization in Cape Breton (Press of the University of Cape Breton: Sydney, 2008), is a thin paperbook book at only132 pages, but befitting his status as the sociological giant of Canada's Scottish Gaelic-speaking community it's quite a good one. First providing a brief survey of the evolution of the Gaelophone community of Scotland, he then turns his eye to Canada. He identifies the Cape Breton's retention of its independence from Nova Scotia as a key event in the evolution of Canadian Gaelic inasmuch as the existence of a province with a Gaelic majority forced the colonial government to communicate with the majority population of unilingual or poorly bilingual Gaelophones, this in turn having a ripple effect elsewhere in Canada. The end result? There are several times as many Gaelophones in Canada as in Scotland, and twice as many Gaelophones in Cape Breton than in Scotland's Western Isles.

MadDiarmid's not an optimist. What, he asks his readers, prevents Canadian Gaelic from going the same way as Newfoundland Irish? The rates of language shift in non-Cape Breton Gaelophone communities are well-known, and even in Cape Breton things are difficult, with Gaelophones surely to lose their majority status as of the next census and the "Town Gaelic" produced in Sydney by the industrial immigrations of the early 20th century starting to show itself as an intermediate stage to full Anglicization. What is there to be done? In brief, he recommends that Cape Breton adopt Québec's full suit of language laws, including mandatory Gaelic-dominant signage and public education. (I'm sure that the Acadians of Arichat, Isle Madame, and Chéticamp would love that.)

MacDiarmid's hope blinds him to the realities facing the language, I fear. Québécois might be a minority in Canada but their an integral member of a worldwide francophonie, a cultural community that can provide essential resources (human, economic, and otherwise) for a traditionally isolated community. Gaelophones can sadly claim no such wider language community. Just as importantly, without any taboos against intermarriage or social intercourse, the community is bound to lose members--my grandparents on Prince Edward Island my mother's side spoke Gaelic to each other, but didn't pass the language on to her, judging it unhelpful in the world and wanting to preserve it as a language for gossip besides. I took my mandatory Basic Gaelic in high school but I can only manage a few words an gàidhlig, mainly--I admit--because I judged French to be a much more useful language. These factors, in top of the fact that cohort fertility is just as low for Gaelophones as for Anglophones, ensure the eventual death of the language--not now, but perhaps in a half-century's time.

His hope aside, I'd still recommend Language Revitalization in Cape Breton. People interested in language dynamics and language policy will love it, as it is not only a case study of minoritized languages but a guide to Canada's language politics. If only, I suppose, things were different, but how could they have been? Canadian Gaelic was lucky as things stand now. In my opinion, the task facing specialists in the language now should probably be to archive as much of the culture as they can before it's took late.

[BRIEF NOTE] Facebook in Egypt

A post by slit regarding Facebook usage in Egypt caught my attention. A quick googling revealed that back in April 2007, Nadine El Sayelhad a piece in Egypt Today ("Smile and Say 'Facebook'") about Egypt and Facebook.

Call it a social network, a place to keep track of your old friends and fill up those empty hours when you have nothing to do, or even call it a place to hook up--whether you like it or not, the Facebook website has become hugely popular among Egypt’s upper-class teens and twentysomethings.

Launched in 2004 to students of a limited group of US-based colleges, Facebook is a social networking site where members create profiles that are visible only to other members; they can then form networks of friends, create groups open to people with similar interests, upload and share photos, and send messages to friends. The site sorts member profiles by the different groups each belongs to, making it easy to find old (and new) friends.

Facebook has seen explosive growth in Egypt among its target market of English-speaking college students, with over 20,000 Egyptian users signing up since general registration began in October 2006. Although young Egyptians still visit MySpace and other social networking sites, Facebook is the clear winner locally.

The Egypt network page claims nearly a half-million members. That's not a trivial number in a country of seventy-five million people with only relatively small middle- and upper-class populations. This has continued, mind, even though this April past an egyptian user of Facebook managed to trigger massive protests against rising prices for food and other commodities.

Last month saw the arrest of Esra Abdel Fattah, 27, after she formed a group on Facebook calling for protests against the high price of food and other commodities in Egypt. Strike action was already planned by factory workers in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kobra, and the Facebook group, which attracted 64,000 members, tapped into a national mood of unrest. During Fattah’s incarceration, police clashed with protestors in Mahalla, killing three; some 500 people were detained.

By the time Egyptian police freed her two weeks ago, Fattah, an active online activist and member of the liberal al-Ghad political party, had become something of a cyber folk hero, feted by Middle Eastern bloggers and tech-minded students. A second Facebook group began calling for the release of Fattah and the other detainees, and for further protests on May 4th. A Cairo University student even heckled the Egyptian prime minister as he gave a speech at the campus on role of the internet as a communication tool:

Fattah is still being harassed by the state. Whether or not young Egyptians--and people fo otehr antionalities--will be able to use Facebook to defy domestic censorship remains to be seen. If nothing else, this will be a pretty impressive footnote to the story of the first social networking-guided revolution? (Will it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Livejournal, or MySpace that does it?)

UPDATE (3:17 PM, 27 August): slit provides more disturbing information on Facebook on Egypt.