The Royal Spanish Academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has launched a project to 'crowd-read' the classic novel Don Quixote. The book, which was written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605, has been divided into 2,149 segments, each of which will be read by a volunteer (in Spanish) and uploaded onto YouTube.
"The Spanish language does not occupy the space that it deserves on the Internet," said Dario Villanueva, the secretary of the academy. "We want to denounce that and do something to correct it."
You can sign up for the project here.
In our 2009 annual report, Language is Everything asked the question: "Which languages are 'punching above their weight' online?" We looked at 117 languages with more than 5 million speakers and calculated the 'relative online strength' of each one. Our list was headed by languages from the Nordic countries, with English ranked 15th and Spanish 38th. You can read the full story here (pages 8-9).
Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday that Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished authors, was the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.