Karelian is an endangered minority language spoken mainly in Finland and in Russia. According to the latest census and research, there are between 5,000 and 10,000 speakers in Finland and about 15,000 speakers in Russia (Sarhimaa 2017; Russian Census 2021). Thousands more understand the language. Karelian has two main dialects - Livvi and Proper Karelian. The latter can be divided into Viena and South Karelian. The diverse use of different dialects of the language and its transnational existence make it challenging to revitalise the language. The internet offers a new domain for using minority languages. The visibility of an endangered language online plays an important role in language revitalisation.

In our presentation we give a brief overview of the current situation of Karelian and the main attempts to revitalise the language. We focus on the use of the Karelian language online, which has increased significantly in recent years (Salonen 2017). We discuss the visibility of Karelian on websites and social media from the perspective of the virtual linguistic landscape and language ideologies. Furthermore, we present our data collection strategy based on the use of language-related keywords and hashtags and examine the language visibility on X, formerly known as Twitter. All the main dialects of Karelian are visible on Twitter, Livvi-Karelian being the most prominent dialect. The entries were also analysed thematically, and 10 major topics were identified. We share our experiences and discuss the challenges researchers face when doing research in the field of minority languages.