Lakota dictionary, children’s books in Apache, Crow language methods: accessible on the internet and smartphone, almost dead Native American languages are being reborn thanks to new technologies, linguists dreaming of regenerating the cultural identity of decimated indigenous people in North America.
Three women from the Apache Native American reservation sit all smiles in front of a computer and a microphone and search their memories for dozens of words relating to cooking and food. To create an online Apache-English dictionary, they work with a method developed on software, “Rapid Word Collection” (RWC), whose algorithm searches written and audio databases to find forgotten words, define them, translate them into English, pronounce them with the correct tone and record them.
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A 68-year-old teacher, Joycelene Johnson, and two colleagues have fun validating “kapas” in Apache which means “potato”. These “written language apps are good for learners who have a collection” of Apache vocabulary and grammar, says Ms. Johnson. In the bilingual schools on his reserve, there are “a thousand students” but “only one speaker in the first grade who speaks fluently.”
The language workshop was one of several at an “International Conference for the Documentation, Education and Revitalization of Indigenous Languages” (ICILDER) last weekend at Indiana University in central Texas. UNITED STATES. A meeting of around forty indigenous and Amerindian tribes and nations from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and New Zealand, which AFP attended in the bucolic setting of the city of Bloomington, a few days later “National Indigenous Peoples Day” in the United States, which has 6.8 million “natives”, or 2% of the population.
Linguists, teachers, students, researchers and indigenous leaders debated the regeneration of their oral languages, each aware of the extent of the threat. Of more than 6,000 indigenous languages listed in the world, almost half are in danger of extinction and 1,500 of immediate disappearance, according to a 2021 study that UNESCO reported on in December.
It is an NGO protecting around fifty indigenous languages in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, The Language Conservancy (TLC), which developed the RWC software to accelerate the release of dictionaries. TLC, with a budget of three million dollars from public and private funds, regularly organizes workshops for groups of Native American teachers and white linguists.
Each group “records 150 words per day, with ten groups that makes 15,000 words every ten days” for each language, welcomes Wilhelm Meya, founding president since 2005 of TLC and co-organizer of ICILDER. “Technology allows us to save languages much faster than ever before. Starting from scratch, today we can create a dictionary in 12 months compared to 20 years ago,” assures this 51-year-old American anthropologist of Austrian origin, who defines himself as a “social entrepreneur” well surrounded by linguists.
Because we have to do it quickly. In the United States and Canada, Native American languages are rapidly becoming extinct with the death of the last speakers. The United States has the highest number of endangered languages, 143 out of 219, followed by Canada with 75 out of 94, according to TLC. There were 400 to 500 indigenous languages spoken from the Atlantic to the Pacific, before the arrival 500 years ago of Europeans who decimated the Native Americans. Today, “the situation is truly reaching a level of crisis and emergency, with the average age of the last speakers being 75 years old,” Mr. Meya is alarmed.
There are only “a few years left to record these languages (online) and on applications,” warns the expert, who distributes his dictionaries, school books and methods free of charge to public educational institutions in American states and Native American reservations. Jacob Chavez, a 26-year-old Cherokee student, says he is “delighted” by these new technologies because his language can “develop” among young people “much faster and for longer” than in the past.
Likewise Pauline Hawkins, a Taltan language teacher, is “really excited and happy to see this dictionary” online even though her parents contributed to the first Taltan dictionary on paper in the 1980s. Her colleague Dannielle North King, 51, of the Chemehuevi tribe, also called Nuwuvi, however, criticizes a “Western method” of transcribing a “spoken indigenous language” into writing.
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In 2022, TLC was mocked by a Lakota official over copyrights of writings by a deceased grandmother that were allegedly used in publishing work. “We do not hold the copyrights of the languages on which we work,” assures Mr. Meya.
As for the risk of being accused of “cultural appropriation”, he answers: “If I were a white doctor with an indigenous patient, would I be prevented from treating him because I am not indigenous?” “Languages are not a racial question” but “the foundation of identity, nation and sovereignty”, defends the expert.
