This post is part of our preview of “Using Citizen Media Tools to Promote Under-Represented Languages.”

Say you’ve always wanted to learn Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in the Andes Region of South America, but you haven’t had the time to properly take classroom lessons. Now a new project called Hablemos Quechua (Let’s Speak Quechua) has developed a way to provide daily lessons through a series of automated Tweets to help build up an interested learner’s vocabulary.

The project describes itself as a “techno-socio-cultural experiment to re-establish connections,” and was developed at Escuela Lab, a “hackspace” located in Lima, Peru. The team includes Kiko Mayorga, developer Mariano Crowe, and Irma Alvarez Ccoscco, a Quechua poet and a translator from the organization Runasimipi. The result of this collaboration is the Twitter account (@hablemosquechua), which currently has nearly 1700 followers. The program draws from a database of Spanish words and their Quechua equivalents to provide vocabulary matches.

It also tweets small quizzes where it asks followers to recall earlier lessons. Read more.

See: Rising Voices

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