Before I move on further I want to show that the concepts of this blog are useful and not just nice metaphors. Let’s take a dying language as an example application of the folded-field. The old way of thinking, the node-link frame, is just so mechanical and broken. It treats language as a tool that’s owned by speakers. Success is just classes and counts.

The folded-field way of thinking sees it completely differently. Language is not an instrument, it’s a curvature of the field. It’s an ongoing inflection where place, kin, weather, humour, trade, and memory all co-resonate. You can’t separate the speakers and the language; they’re co-emergent faces of one fold. So to revive it, you don’t force people into classrooms. You have to re-curve the habitat so the language just reappears as the obvious way the world sounds. What does this actually unlock?

First, I think you stop thinking about curriculum and start thinking about curvature and intensities. The effort shifts from moving bodies into classrooms to densifying the language’s ambient fold. You put it on street and station names, footy chants, café menus, bus stop poetry, app UI defaults, shop receipts. These are micro-folds that re-tune daily life until using the language is the path of least resistance.

Second, you use time as topology. You anchor the language to daily/weekly standing waves, the school roll call on Mondays, prime-time weather reports, Saturday markets, bedtime lullabies. When the temporal cadence carries it, usage travels without coercion.

Third, you replace gates or purity tests with a gradient of invitation: play, then mimic, then mix, then mastery. You encourage memes, comedy nights, karaoke hooks. This play-first, formalise-later approach lets the fold widen. Identity grows by in-folding, not policing.

Fourth, you treat institutions as slow folds. Places like libraries, clinics, footy clubs, and councils are long-duration curvatures. If you can change one keystone fold, like making a clinic intake happen bilingually, every time, it re-shapes all the adjacent folds way more than sporadic campaigns ever could.

Fifth, you see devices as also in the field. Our phone keyboards, autocorrect, route planners, and voice assistants are part of the field. When the default affordance speaks the language, the field itself prompts utterance. There’s no push, just an immanent suggestion.

And finally, you stop using headcounts and start using resonance metrics. You measure resonant strength. This means looking for spontaneous co-occurrence across contexts (do they use it at home and the shop and at sport?). You look for cross-scale echoes (does kids’ slang get picked up in radio patter and then in council minutes?). You measure dwell-time (how long can they talk before code-switching?). These are real field diagnostics, and I think much better indicators than enrolment stats.

The whole synthesis is just this: Stop trying to move people toward a language; re-fold the world so the language is what the world already does.