Indigenous languages have a precarious existence in contemporary times. Although so many local, vernacular languages have been spoken and transmitted for hundreds of years, most find themselves at the threat of extinction today. The severity of the crisis can be aptly conveyed with this one statistic by the United Nations: an indigenous language goes extinct once every two weeks.
Technology has had a complex role to play in indigenous languages’ fight for survival. On the one hand, it promises a path towards survival for these languages. At the same time, modern information processing systems might also be pushing indigenous languages closer to the brink of extinction.
The Technological Threat to Indigenous Languages
‘Digital divide’ is a term that’s often used to describe the unequal access that different demographic groups have to modern information processing and communication systems. But there’s also a digital divide when it comes to the languages that are spoken in the world today.
There’s now a term for it: digitally-disadvantaged languages. Coined by Unicode Consortium co-founder Mark Davis, it refers to the languages that find themselves at a disadvantage in an increasingly digital world. The reason: most operating systems, computational devices, and popular applications don’t encode these languages.
In the current technological landscape, most languages fall on the wrong side of the digital divide. According to Davis, a whopping 98 percent of languages are digitally disadvantaged. Andras Kornai, a mathematical linguist and professor at the Budapest Institute of Technology, estimates that only 5% of the languages spoken today will become digitally viable. A majority of indigenous languages fall in the 95% that face digital extinction.
The lack of digital support makes it significantly tougher for the speakers of indigenous languages to carry out functions that would be trivial for most people. For example, people who speak unsupported languages might be forced to send images of hand-written texts instead of simply typing out a message. Most such users choose instead to transliterate their messages in a supported script, thus further increasing the reliance on dominant languages.
Digital recognition of a language isn’t just a matter of usability for indigenous communities. It also connects to a concept in sociolinguistics known as prestige — the degree of social value accorded to different languages. With indigenous languages being rendered obsolete in the digital world, they’re faced with deteriorating linguistic prestige. This makes it less likely that new generations of speakers learn and transmit these languages, thus pushing them closer to extinction.
Technology as an Ally to Indigenous Languages
Paradoxically, technology might also be a tool that could help indigenous languages gain greater relevance. These also make learning and transmission more efficient. Several projects have been undertaken towards that end. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
SILICON by Stanford
The Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media, or SILICON, is a project that aims to solve a problem that we discussed in the previous section: encoding digitally disadvantaged languages. The project uses innovative keyboard and font design, optical character recognition algorithms, and artificial intelligence to make it easier for indigenous language speakers to communicate via digital devices.
Woolaroo by Google Arts and Culture
Woolaroo is a piece of experimental technology by the Google Arts and Culture project. The goal is to help preserve seventeen indigenous languages that are currently endangered, including Louisiana Creole, Sicilian, Rapa Nui, and Tamazight.
The tool is delivered in the form of a web application. All you need to do is visit the website and upload an image of an object. Woolaroo uses machine learning and object recognition to identify those objects and teaches users how to say them in those seventeen endangered languages.
FirstVoices
FirstVoices is a project undertaken by the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation. It uses a combination of community programs and digital tools to help preserve indigenous languages. The team works with elders from different communities to create digital archives. They also develop tools like digital keyboards which at this point support over 100 indigenous languages.
Towards A More Equitable Digital-Linguistic Landscape
The disappearance of a language doesn’t entail losing just the signs and meanings that were part of its lexicon. It also means losing an entire culture, the knowledge embedded within it, and moving humanity closer to a more homogeneous experience of the world.
For that reason, it’s essential that indigenous languages gain greater recognition in our modern digital systems. However, this is a process that needs to be undertaken with great care.
Isabelle A. Zaugg, in a paper titled Digital Surveillance and Digitally-disadvantaged Language Communities raises questions about how assimilating indigenous communities into the digital world can expose them to the harms of digital surveillance. These communities quite often find themselves in socially and economically marginalized positions in society. Therefore, the process of integrating them into these systems needs to minimize the harms to which they can be exposed.
The crisis of language extinction is a global problem that needs to be addressed in a holistic manner. Technology has had a role to play in the erosion of the status of indigenous language in modern times. However, if we’re able to harness the positive potential of our technological tools, we will be able to use them to help indigenous languages — and the communities that speak them–survive for many more years to come.
