Written by Dyami Millarson

We are thrilled to announce that we have welcomed our 1800th follower on Sunday 15 November 2020. This is a sure sign that our work is in a trajectory towards increasing public recognition. We know for a fact new readers support our mission as they read and like our mission statement page.

I still remember when our blog was struggling to reach one hundred followers a few years ago. In the beginning, we really had to work hard to prove ourselves, because the subject matter of our blog was quite novel to many and in fact, the topic seemed too exotic to become successful. The Frisian languages we have been studying intensively since 2016 never received much international attention and the growth opportunities for a blog dedicated to this topic seemed exceedingly slim, so the whole concept truly seemed preposterous, to many it seemed nothing short of a recipe for failure. We did, however, not let this discourage us and we kept working hard these years. We didn’t ever give up. We always believed that we should just keep producing new articles as we believe the production of new written texts would help preserve the languages. We considered the production of articles to be our top priority, and even if not many people read our articles at that time, we thought it was convenient to have a public space for saving our language study progress and our thoughts.

While it always seemed uncertain that our blog would receive wide public acceptance, we always kept believing in the potential of our subject matter to attract new people. We have been not that active on our blog this year while we were occupied with other practical matters which were also important for the development of the Operation X organisation, but we have been slowly restarting our old routine of regular article production at the end of this year. As a result, we are suddenly attracting many new readers and we are witnessing increasing public appreciation of our work.

It is truly heart-warming to see that people from all over the world are showing their support for our work by following our blog, liking our articles and even leaving thoughtful comments. We know that the topic of Frisian minority languages is quite exotic to many of our readers, but we are trying to help our readers understand how fascinating this topic is, and we are trying to show them the many facets of this topic, because it is not at all a boring topic, it can be approached from many angles and it is relevant in many different contexts, as can be seen in the variety of articles we publish on our blog for our readers to read about our work and our expanding interests.

People can follow our learning progress on our blog. We are a self-development blog in a way, because we are sharing our personal experiences of learning endangered languages. This concept has not been tried before for minority languages, definitely not in the way that we do this, because people always think there will be little interest in this topic, and to disprove this wrong notion that these languages and cultures will never truly receive a lot of international acclaim, we hope that our blog, thanks to our continuous efforts, will keep growing as a testament to the immense international interest in the preservation of languages, cultures and different modes of thinking.

When people support our blog, this directly translates to support for minority languages. In other words, it means that the languages we seek to give a platform on our blog are receiving more public recognition. Indeed, these languages are gaining a more serious online presence since most of them were fairly unknown online before our blog started offering them a platform. We are trying to make a difference in this world by writing this blog and your support means the world to us, we can make the voices of these languages heard across the entire planet with your help. We therefore hope that you will continue following, liking and commenting on our work. We are very grateful to everyone who has been supporting us these years, you helped keeping us motivated.

I had to postpone writing this article, because I was quite tired last night after working quite a bit on my upcoming article about tamanu oil, it was especially exhausting to dig deep for information about tamanu in the Tahitian language and kamani int he Hawaiian language. I will share some interesting facts with you guys in my upcoming article on tamanu oil, so stay tuned!