These 3 Native American Women Are Harnessing Technology To Revive Endangered Languages

Native Americans are using technology to revitalize their communities’ threatened languages through online dictionaries.

As part of a project by the Language Conservancy, Native American women are working with Rapid Word Collection (RWC) software to revive, remember, and record dozens of Apache language words related to everyday living.

Disappearing Languages

There are approximately 150 Native North American languages spoken in the United States today by more than 350,000 people.

However, the majority of Native Americans today speak only English.

This is due to a number of reasons, including the federal government, in the 19th century, set up boarding schools to assimilate Native American children into American culture.

One of the objectives was to get them to turn away from using their native languages.

This also included the forced assimilation that resulted from the Indian Civilization Act of 1918, which established Indian boarding schools to teach subjects such as math and science while suppressing the use of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Boarding schools lasted until the mid-20th century, and their effect was devastating for Indigenous communities and their languages.

Of the roughly 2.7 million American Indians and Alaska Natives counted by the 2016 census, three-quarters of those aged five years or older spoke only English.

Of the more than 6,000 Indigenous languages recognized globally, nearly half of them are at risk of disappearing, with about 1,500 facing immediate extinction.

The average age of Indigenous speakers in the US and Canada is around 75, highlighting only a few years left to document these languages, Wilhelm Meya, the CEO of The Language Conservancy, told Phys.org.

Therefore, linguistic experts such as three Native American women are trying to use technology to benefit the threatened languages.

The English-Apache Dictionary

Joycelene Johnson, Elva Case, and Linda Lupe are all teachers creating an online English Apache dictionary.

To do so, they work with Rapid Word Collection (RWC) software, which uses an algorithm to search Apache text and audio databases for forgotten words.

The words are then defined, translated into English, and their pronunciation recorded so the dictionary’s users will know how to say them correctly.

The RWC method, developed by The Language Conservancy, aims to revolutionize the task of collecting words by using a systemic method to capture these words in a workshop organized in the language community.

They believe that words are the building blocks of any communication.

They contain information not only about language but also about culture, as many minority languages around the world are crippled by the fact that no dictionary exists in the language.

“The applications in the written language are good for a non-speaker – at least they’ll have a museum of it where they can go for reference,” said Joycelene Johnson, a 68-year-old who teaches Apache vocab and grammar.