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Indigenous researchers are up against a ticking clock: Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, one dies every two weeks with its last speaker. "Within the next five to 10 years, we'll lose most of the Native American languages in the U.S.," Michael Running Wolf, founder of Indigenous in AI, an international community of Native, Aboriginal and First Nations engineers, said. Running Wolf has dedicated his career to preventing this loss. He leads First Languages AI Reality, an initiative of the Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, where researchers are building speech recognition models for over 200 endangered Indigenous languages in North America.

An International Year is an important cooperation mechanism dedicated to raising awareness of a particular topic or theme of global interest or concern, and mobilizing different players for coordinated action around the world. In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, based on a recommendation by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. At the time, the Forum said that 40 per cent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing. The fact that most of these are indigenous languages puts the cultures and knowledge systems to which they belong at risk. In addition, indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions. And yet, they are not only leaders in protecting the environment, but their languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation. They also foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years. Indigenous languages add to the rich tapestry of global cultural diversity. Without them, the world would be a poorer place.

Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon's Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Or imagine a digital language playground in Facebook's Metaverse, where programmers create interactive games to enhance Indigenous language learning. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make these dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up in Birney, a town with a population of 150 just south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging. And he believes artificial intelligence is the solution. Running Wolf is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who are studying Indigenous languages and AI. He works with a small team of linguists and data scientists, and together, they analyze Indigenous languages and work to translate them into something a computer can interpret. If his team can accomplish this, Running Wolf reasons, then perhaps AI can be used to help revitalize Indigenous languages everywhere.

The project, called Celebrating Indigenous Languages, is designed to honour the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages. Users of Google Earth are now able to hear over 50 Indigenous language speakers from across the globe saying words and simple phrases and even singing traditional songs.

NPR's Jasmine Garsd, cohost of Alt.Latino, NPR's weekly music podcast, speaks re: indigenous lyrics and music sung in indigenous languages, fused to Western idioms like hip-hop and electronica. The show itself, featuring artists who showcase their musical talents in indigenous languages from Mapuche to Tzotzil, Guarani and Quechua, can be found at this link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/altlatino/2015/03/05/390934624/hear-6-latin-american-artists-who-rock-in-indigenous-languages

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

Similar to `ōlelo Hawai`i in Hawaii, the indigenous Maori language [te reo Maori] was banned in New Zealand schools for much of the 20th century. At the same time, many rural Maori were moving into the cities where they had to speak English. That meant that by the 1980s, only 20 percent of indigenous New Zealanders were fluent in the Maori language.That number was virtually unchanged by 2013. Government data that year showed that just 21.3 percent of the Maori population could have a conversation in te reo. An official government report published in 2010 warned the language was nearing extinction. Fortunately, in 2018, Maori is enjoying increased popularity among New Zealanders, Maori or otherwise, taking pride in their South Pacific nation's indigenous culture. Te reo Maori courses are booked out at community colleges, while bands, poets and rappers perform using the language. Te reo Maori words have entered people's everyday language. Examples include "kai" meaning food, "ka pai" meaning congratulations, and "whanau" meaning family. Even the way New Zealanders define themselves has taken on a te reo tone. An increasing number prefer to call their country "Aotearoa" rather than New Zealand.

Ar Metlaloke (The Tlaloques Hunter), a comic book reimagining a traditional indigenous Mexican story, is the first of its kind written in Hñäñho, the language of the Ñäñho people, as well as in Spanish and English. It represents a larger, ongoing effort to preserve the people's culture, which is under threat as speakers decline and cultural bonds erode from centuries of colonial policies. The language-sometimes called Otomi, from the Spanish name for the community-is imperiled. Today it is one of several regional dialects of a mother tongue with fewer than 300,000 speakers, a figure that's been dropping for decades.

Pelota mixteca has been played for hundreds of years by indigenous people throughout the Americas. But it's more than a competitive event.

This sport is a weekly ritual and is a network for an immigrant community. It also serves a pastime for people and allows them to speak their own indigenous languages. Players who speak indigenous languages such as Zapotec and Mixtec travel to these games where there are even under-the-radar international tournaments.

The Gitxsan Nation, an indigenous tribe, is located in northwestern British Columbia. Victoria software developer and linguist Aidan Pine used open source code to adapt the virally-popular online game Wordle for Gitxsan. While Pine recognizes that games like Wordle can support language learners, Pine said he's it's important to remember that technology is not what keeps languages alive. "People revitalize languages through hard work and determination. And if small games like this can help or make it easier, that's great." Stay tuned--word has it there's an `Ōlelo Hawai`i version in the works, and other coder linguists can find Pineʻs code here (itʻs adaptable to any language): github.com/roedoejet/AnyLanguage-Wordle

https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2022/02/uh-maui-college-professor-releases-hawaiian-version-of-online-game-wordle/ Ka pepa uila: hulihua.net

To this day, Paraguay remains the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks one indigenous language: Guaraní. It is enshrined in the Constitution, officially giving it equal footing with the language of European conquest, Spanish. And in the streets, it is a source of national pride.

This article talks about how an Objiwe women built robots in order for the Native American children in her community (and others) to learn their indigenous culture and languages. It is so interesting to program a robot to speak a language to prevent indigenous languages from going endangered/extinct.

"Christian missionaries have become strangely vital to conserving endangered languages... In 1951 Pittman had started interviewing missionaries and linguists about the languages that were spoken in the parts of the world where they worked. The result was a language catalogue called Ethnologue... For example, the Spanish priests who followed the conquistadors into South America documented indigenous languages as they went."

An excerpt examining the effect of writing indigenous languages to revive and revitalize them.

Article, by Punahou alumna Alia Wong, profiles Kaipo`i Kelling, a Hawaiian language immersion teacher, the near-devastation of the indigenous language due to missionary contact, and the subsequent revitalization of `ōlelo Hawai`i.

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. And white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.

This article talks about how diverse languages are around the world and how thousands of languages are becoming extinct. It talked about how every language has different forms of grammar and linguists are not necessarily interested in "correct grammar" because we know that grammar changes throughout time and places. This can help us understand our history and how our minds work. I found it interesting that many indigenous languages will become extinct in the near future. For example, South America and Australia are expected to lose all indigenous languages.

Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut

UH-Manoa's Institute for Hawaiian Language Research and Translation provides access and research capacity into the extensive archive of Hawaiian language materials, making more than a century of historical documentation about Hawaiian knowledge and experience available for study. Browse through the Hawaiian Language Newspaper database to view side-by-side scans of original Hawaiian language articles, along with their English translation!

This article explores the revival of Wampanoag (Wôpanâak)--an Algonquian language spoken by Native Americans living in Southeastern Massachusetts when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The story of the linguistic reclaimation's told in Anne Makepeace's documentary, _We Still Live Here_.

Wow!