Endangered languages ​​gain space in language learning apps

Common in Brazil between the late 17th and early 20th centuries, Nheengatu, or the general language, is “severely threatened”, according to the Unesco Atlas of Languages ​​in Danger. This language, a product of the encounter between native Tupi-speaking peoples and Jesuits in the colonization process of the Amazon, currently has 6,000 speakers, according to the document.

She was chosen by web developer Suellen Tobler for the first Brazilian indigenous language teaching app. Earlier this year, the tool was included in the Aldir Blanc Law, through the Department of Culture of Pará. “The moment I saw the notice, the application came to my mind”, says Tobler. It is now available in an initial version with 65 exercises.

Initiatives such as the developer’s pop up around the world, in independent works or applications already established. Duolingo and uTalk, for example, teach endangered languages ​​such as Welsh, Hawaiian and Guarani.

Although the click for Tobler’s project was born when the developer saw the notice, it began to be gestated a year earlier, in 2019.

At that time, during a two-month trip down the Amazon River, she decided to move to the region. He settled in Alter do Chão and started a course in anthropology at Ufopa (Federal University of Western Pará). It was on a job opportunity in the São Francisco village that he came into contact with the language, through his nheengatu teacher Dailza Araújo.

“I stayed at her house and she started teaching me some words in nheengatu, while I taught her English words to her niece. In all our spare moments we had this disinterested exchange,” he says.

In his luggage, back to his house, he took the book Nheengatu Tapajoara, published at Ufopa. Leafing through it, he wondered if he could learn the language through an app, as he was doing with German at the time, but he couldn’t find any tools. The missing push was given by the public notice, launched in 2020.

To launch the project, he studied the apps that already existed. “There I understood, as a programmer, how they made those apps fun,” she says. One of the patterns in these programs is repetition, for example. As he was not fluent, he researched the book he had received from Dailza Araújo and the booklet for the Tupi course at USP —whose linguistic trunk is shared by the Nheengatu.

Throughout the process, it had to make adaptations. In the beginning, the idea was to make an Android-only app, which could limit user access. During development, however, it decided to use the PWA (Progressive Web App). The technology, relatively new to the market, allows a single programming code to be accessed by any operating system: Chrome OS, Android, iOS.

Plans include expanding language learning levels, allowing offline exercises and eventually creating an administrative area for teachers. The developer says that, as it is, the application can be replicated in any indigenous language, with adaptations.

Recently, Tobler held a meeting with teachers from schools on the Amazon, Rio Negro, Tapajós and Arapiuns rivers, as well as academics from USP and Ufopa, to improve the application. “I would like the indigenous teachers themselves to seize this tool”, he says. “It’s a live app.”

Nheengatu is an official language in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas, alongside Portuguese, Tukano and Baniwa.

Since 2016, one of the most popular language teaching platforms in the world, Duolingo, has offered Irish language instruction, which today has 44,000 speakers. Since then, other languages ​​have been incorporated, such as Navajo (spoken in North America) and Hawaiian, which are also threatened with extinction. Most can be learned only by those who speak English. The exception is Guarani, which is available to Spanish speakers.

Ten years ago, even before Duolingo was launched, Myra Awodey, a specialist in German literature, helped the app create European language education. At the beginning, he says, he thought the tool would only be for teaching the most popular languages.

“We had an incredible show of support from people who wanted to learn languages, but also who wanted to help build languages,” says she, who is now responsible for developing minority language courses at Duolingo.

“We were told, ‘You have the tools, we have the knowledge. Why don’t you open up your tools so we can help you create free courses for smaller languages?'”

The Irish’s repercussion was a surprise. “In one year, we reached 1 million students, which is more than the number of native speakers,” says Awodey.

“We realize that Duolingo has the potential to not only help people learn major languages, but also to help a language grow rather than shrink. protect linguistic diversity,” he says.

The development process of the tools for these languages ​​on the platform remains collaborative. The team is made up of people from Duolingo and experts with experience in teaching the language.

“In addition to native speakers, employees must count on the support of their communities”, he says. “They work on quality control and sentence creation, but our learning and technology scientists and fluency experts advise along the way.”

Community support is important because there is not always unanimity among native speakers about sharing the language with others or writing it in the case of oral languages. “Many are spoken and used for ceremonial or sacred purposes, and writing and sharing is very controversial.

Lessons are adapted according to the language taught. Currently, the platform faces the challenge of teaching the “consonant clicks”, a sound made with the language that appears in languages ​​spoken especially in southern Africa — and that do not have the exposure of English or French, for example.

“For larger languages, we use a sort of automated text, which comes out like a robotic voice. That’s possible because there’s a lot of data to train. all the sentences”, he explains.

In an individual project, linguist and master in processing and speech and language Aidan Pine develops open source technologies for indigenous languages. The Canadian’s main project, Mother Tongues (Native Languages), is a tool for indigenous language dictionaries.

One of Pine’s challenges in creating the tool was the different writing systems in the same language, in addition to students who occasionally write with errors.

“We needed to create an application that would display the right word in the dictionary even if you typed it wrongly or mistyped. And that’s what Mother Tongues does. In the software, there’s a so-called ‘approximate search algorithm’,” he explains. Based on conversations with language teachers, he incorporates the main mistakes made by students.

The spark for the initiative was the combination of his interest in linguistics and the feeling of injustice in the face of the erasure of indigenous culture. “When a language dies, we lose an ecosystem of ideas and the possibilities of connecting humans with their community. Language is that glue,” he says.

Despite the effort to maintain the project and create new tools, Pine guarantees that he is not saving a language. “People save languages, people who spend hours learning and teaching their languages ​​and building a community. Indigenous people save languages. Maybe technology can help,” he says.