Technology is accelerating the rate of language extinction, even as it offers hope for preserving endangered and extinct languages.
A new crowdsourcing platform aims to preserve the sounds of Romeika, its endangered relationship with the Greek language, considered a “treasure trove of languages and a living bridge to the ancient world” said. Phys.org. Romeika is thought to have only “a few thousand” native speakers in Turkey, most of whom are over 65 years old and do not have a writing system. Professor Ioanna Sitaridou from the University of Cambridge is calling on Romaika speakers to upload audio recordings of their language as part of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32) initiative.
But the big danger for many languages is “the transition to the digital age,” he said. luck. As humans increasingly communicate online, languages not supported by major platforms may be forgotten. Languages are lost every three to four months, “the fastest rate in recorded history.” forbesaccelerated by the spread of Internet English as the “lingua franca of the technological age.”
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How does technology threaten language?
According to the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, nearly half of the world’s 7,000 spoken languages are at risk of extinction. Several times a year, the last speaker of a language dies and there are no new speakers to replace it. According to the study, one indigenous language disappears every two weeks. united nations.
The technology sector can help save endangered languages, but as the pace of development accelerates, so do the threats.It said that about 97% of the world’s languages are characterized as “digitally disadvantaged”. news room.
Phones and computers made primarily in the United States use English and the Roman alphabet, but when another writing system doesn’t fit that model, “those communities are at a significant disadvantage.” says Stanford University professor Tom Malaney. East Asian languages.
Karthik Chidambaram, a native Tamil speaker, wrote in Fortune magazine that people are “used to English being their first language of choice.” People who speak the 247-letter Tamil language “often type the English letters” for transliteration.
For the millions of people who speak languages without digital text or fonts, “much of modern life is off-limits,” the newsroom said. Many languages have scripts that are not part of the Unicode standard for digital text and characters. Therefore, an artificial intelligence tool trained on digital text will not be able to read it. Meanwhile, vast swathes of social media are dominated by American English.
A hyper-connected digital world “threatens to hasten the extinction of many languages”.
One “particularly concerning” study published in 2013 predicted that “less than 5% of all languages will make it into the digital realm,” Chidambaram said. The paper warned of a “large-scale population decline due to the digital divide.”
How can technology help?
This month, Living Tongues partnered with audio company Shure on their “No Voice Left Behind” campaign. The campaign used the company’s new direct-to-phone MoveMic, a wireless clip-on microphone for TikTok creators, to record some endangered languages. more remote parts of the world.
The microphone is “compact, discreet, and easy to use, meaning people can speak naturally without distraction,” Dr. Luke Hollo, senior research fellow in phonetics at Living Tongues, told Forbes. Rechargeable batteries can also be charged with mobile batteries or solar panels.
The institute also maintains the Living Dictionaries platform, a “community-driven repository for people creating online reference sources for their languages,” Forbes said. It serves as a bank for languages that are near extinction or have already disappeared.
Chidambaram heads a company called DCKAP. His company is one of several aiming to develop keyboards that allow typing in Tamil rather than transliterating English letters. “We draw inspiration from designers who have created Chinese solutions,” Chidambaram wrote in Fortune magazine.
Meanwhile, Malaney is leading a new project called SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media), which also aims to add more languages to the Unicode standard. Dr. Kathryn Starkey, co-founder of SILICON and professor of German and medieval studies, said the goal is to “help level the playing field for languages other than English.”
“These languages have deep historical, cultural and social relevance and value,” Malaney said. “If humanity does not understand this properly, there is an immeasurable amount of wisdom and experience that will be lost.”
