Written by Dyami Millarson

It was only recently that we celebrated having 1300 followers on our charitable blog, but our charitable blog has grown exponentially in recent days and so we are happy to announce that we have 1400 followers now (we reached this important milestone on 15 Oct.). We could not feel more indebted to our followers because they read, like and comment on our articles. All of you who follow us, please know that you are helping to make a difference in the world. Your support is vital for our charity work. When I tell tell these communities how many followers we have online, they are overcome with an incredulous happiness and they say “Are people from all over the world really interested in our culture/language?” I tell them with a confident tone of voice: “Yes, these online folks care about you and they surely like reading articles about your language and culture.”

We do not earn money from assisting aboriginal European minority groups, but we earn many smiles and joyful tears. Although we should probably try to expand our financial resources by other means such as crowd-funding in order to keep doing our charitable activities in Europe, we have so far always relied on our own funds and financial investments. We do not have the deep pockets of universities and academies, but we still try to guarantee quality and we require our fieldwork to be professional and our research to be scientific. We do all of our activities for free and we have a minimalist philosophy. We have always been a team of people who try to make the most of the limited resources we have.

We learned this from many years of being unable to afford language-learning resources and scientific works (we never complained about being unable to afford these things). We had to figure everything out on our own and we had to rely on freely available resources. This forced us to invent our own methods, devise our own resources, and learn all the necessary skills to rely on ourselves. We have often emphasised resourcefulness, working for free and total independence from expensive materials that we cannot afford. This attitude was born of necessity, and we are a team that was brought together by our similar circumstances in life. We have supported each other unconditionally, and we are willing to likewise support as many aboriginal minority groups in Europe as we can and we are eager to learn to speak and write their languages and as we are studying those languages, we are definitely going to be blogging in them regularly.

While we have 1400 followers now, this helps us realise that we have come a long way, because our blog had zero followers in 2016 when our first articles were published and we got our first followers in 2017 when we started producing more articles. Regular and daily production of articles really started from the final months of 2018, and it has continued without a break until this day. We have now already reached our 289-day streak for this year and the streak is more than 300 days if we include previous year (unfortunately we are having some technical issues with the display of our streak and WP technical support staff are currently trying their best to help us fix that as soon as possible). We really hope that we can keep producing daily articles for our readers and we wish to maintain the quality of our articles as well as improve the quality of our articles. In our team, we always emphasise regular production and quality simultaneously. We enjoy learning together and we always try to not abandon our original principle that we prefer quality over quantity and that we want to present original content as opposed to things copied from Wikipedia. We have so far lived up to our own expectations.

Our plans are designed to be flexible and highly adaptable to the circumstances we may have in our daily lives. Due to various unforeseen factors, we have had to ‘modify’ our flexible plans somewhat that we set out for 2019 in the beginning of the year, but the most important thing – as always – is that everything is still going according to the 2019 plan that we originally designed and our mutual agreements for 2019 have not been broken and remain intact. We have so far never cancelled one of our mutually agreed upon plans or broken one of our mutual agreements, and we are satisfied with such a historical record of keeping to every single one of our commitments. Our teamwork is about interpersonal relationships and we value good character traits and ethics in order to inspire each other. This is all the more the case since we have limited resources which force us to be highly efficient and we do not have any personal financial gain from Operation X, our non-profit initiative for investigating and experimenting how to reverse the language death of indigenous languages in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

We will continue our charitable research and testing of language death reversal methodologies by using limited modern technologies and financial resources. We hope to devote our lives to this because there is so much to learn. We have to live like monks by necessity, but we are willing to sacrifice some comforts for the sake of the progress of humanity. We truly believe that studying languages is our destiny and that they hold the keys to unlocking cultures and folk religions and local histories and local environments (geography and history are intertwined in some mysterious ways).

Moreover, languages help us understand sustainable ecological systems and what amounts to various forms of sustainable interaction between man and nature. These same languages teach us human virtues such as balance, moderation, humility, etc. That is why we are eager to adopt the languages ourselves and blog in them actively and speak and write them privately as well. We believe genuinely in the beneficial properties of these languages and to test our beliefs we learn to speak and write the languages ourselves. This intimacy with the languages has led to various surprising insights that we could not have anticipated, and this proves once again that it is best to immerse ourselves in the languages and integrate with the cultures ourselves in order to understand the speakers’ reality or their native mode of thought. This is very different from being an outsider who merely describes from an outsider’s point of view and remains incredulous to the fluent speakers’ claims about their language; we think that the indigenous perspective ought to be taken seriously. It is too easy for outsiders to dismiss the thoughts of the various ‘tribes of people’ who speak these indigenous languages. Understanding requires profound effort to internalise others’ knowledge and adopt others’ point of view as legitimate. That is what is often missing umfortunately and we hope to address the dearth of empathy and humanity towards these communities by carrying out our numerous projects.

(I wrote this post to celebrate together with our followers, although I have been very ill recently. I have my ups and downs due to a chronic illness. Unfortunately, many comments addressed to me have still been left unanswered. I hope you guys can forgive me for this because I am doing the best I can and I am recently just too exhausted to do more than what I am already doing. I am already happy if I can keep posting regularly and keep reading your comments. Please continue sending your kind words of encouragement to us and please keep sending your questions or responses even jf we do not respond immediately, we really appreciate the feedback we get from you guys.)