ContribuLing 2021 keynote by Anna Belew on gathering for language tech: transcript

Key points

• About 7000 languages exist and almost half are at risk, yet language revitalization is growing, with about two-thirds of known programs starting since 2000.
• Digital initiatives are a common revitalization activity, and the UN plans for the 2022 to 2032 decade of indigenous languages stress the role of technology.
• Social media activism, wikis, computational tools and learning tools all support under-resourced languages and counter the stigma that some languages are unfit for the digital world.
• Language technology must not replicate colonial structures, so data sovereignty and intellectual property need to be settled with language communities from the start.
• Gathering gives strength and relationships for lonely work, but physical events are unequally accessible, especially for scholars in the global south.
• The Endangered Languages Project is building a revitalization help desk with forums, free multilingual resources, language stories and experienced practitioners to help.

Chapters

1. 0:00Welcome and speaker background
2. 2:29Language loss and the growth of revitalization
3. 6:29Why language technology matters
4. 8:07Social media, wikis, computational and learning tools
5. 11:54Risks: data sovereignty and digital colonialism
6. 14:45Why gathering together matters
7. 18:32Unequal access to physical gatherings
8. 19:07The planned revitalization help desk
9. 23:10Closing thanks

Full transcript

0:00Hi, good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. I'm very honored to be opening ContribuLing to talk to you today. And I'd like to speak a little bit about the topic of gathering together. Nope. Hi, good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, depending on where are. I'm very honored to speak to you today to open up ContribuLing 2021. And today I'd like to talk a little bit about gathering together to build digital language resources.

0:47Before we get started, I'd like to respectfully acknowledge that I'm talking to you from the territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kaflamette, Plaquemus, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapoya, Molalla, and many other peoples who live and travel along the intersection of the Columbia and Willamette River Valleys here in Portland, Oregon, where Chinook Wawa is still spoken. So a bit about myself, just so you know who you're hearing all this from. My name is Anna Belew, and I'm the outreach coordinator at the Endangered Languages Project. I am also an adjunct assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I am, broadly speaking, a sociolinguist who works in language documentation, revitalization, and African languages, particularly Cameroonian languages.

1:35languages. And I am a settler here on Turtle Island whose language background very boringly is just English. As far as I know, it's English all the way back. And so I'm speaking as someone who is working in indigenous language spaces and who is hoping to relay some of what I've learned in working in these spaces. And the Endangered Languages Project, we are a project co-founded by the First Peoples Cultural Council in Victoria, British Columbia, and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu, Hawaii. And it's, roughly speaking, a global project to support language documentation and revitalization by providing information, digital learning resources, and online community for people around the world engaged in language work. You can find out more about us at endangeredlanguages.com.

2:29So, currently, as most of you are probably aware, this is the worst of times for global language diversity. There are about 7000 languages spoken on earth today, and almost half of them by our best estimates are currently at risk of failing silent in the next couple of generations. The reasons for this are numerous and complicated, but as you're probably aware, perhaps from personal experience, indigenous and endangered languages face overt suppression or even genocide in the worst cases.

3:03Economic and political disenfranchisement of the people who speak or sign these languages. These people are often dispossessed of their lands and traditional livelihoods. Languages face state neglect or the failure to provide appropriate support. There can be social stigma against the use of indigenous, endangered or minoritized languages or even violence against people who use these languages. And we really cannot sugarcoat it. The current situation of global language diversity is more threatened than it ever has been.

3:36From all available data, the current rate and scope of language loss is higher than at any known time in all of human history. Languages are falling silent faster and at a broader scale than they ever have. But it's not all grim because this is also the best of times so far for language reclamation and revitalization. The rates of these activities are growing and higher than they ever have been.

4:07So Gabriela Pérez Baez and her colleagues presented an overview drawn from a global survey of 245 different language revitalization programs. and that sounds like a lot but there are probably perhaps hundreds of revitalization initiatives which aren't represented in that survey and more which are starting now or will soon start and so if you are involved in a language revitalization project we are continuing Dr. Perez-Bias's global survey of revitalization efforts here at ELP we would love to learn more about your work and so about two-thirds of all known language revitalization efforts have begun just since the year 2000 right the last 20 years have seen a phenomenal growth in language revitalization work and almost one-third of all language revitalization programs have launched since the year 2010 and i believe this data was collected ending in 2017 or 18 so

5:07So not even that full decade, and we've seen just a monumental growth in language revitalization work. And digital initiatives, broadly speaking, are the fifth most common activity in revitalization programs, right? So this is not perhaps the primary activity in most revitalization work, but it is fairly common and it's growing. And this includes things like including the language on the internet or in phone apps, social media, video games, etc. Or use of digital platforms for language learning.

5:42So broadly speaking, all of the things that you folks are here to present about today. And while this conference may not be specifically about the revitalization of so-called endangered languages, the underlying goals of language revitalization and the development of language technologies are really shared, I think. And that goal is to ensure that every language has the resources and support structures needed for it to thrive both now in the near term and in the longer term future and of course the caveat tech is not a magic bullet for sustaining languages right for language to continue thriving it needs people to use it but technology is absolutely a useful tool in this work.

6:29And this really is the best of times for language technology, not just in my opinion, but in the opinion of the United Nations. So plans for the upcoming 2022 to 2032 international decade of indigenous languages. It highlights the importance of tech in supporting this work. So they say language technology is not just a niche issue, but something that has true impact on indigenous language endangerment, and can therefore help reverse those trends.

7:02So obviously this work needs to be done, this work to create digital tools and resources for less resourced languages. So how do we go about doing it, right? This is a pretty new field. Widespread internet use among human beings is only two decades or less old. And we have even less experience building tech tools to make the internet and other digital spaces is more inclusive for languages. So where do we turn to learn how to do this work in a good way?

7:34Well, we can turn to each other. We can turn to the people who are already doing this work and who have some experience under their belts. We have to share ideas and inspiration and lessons from our own work, from our own successes and failures and challenges. And we have to do it internationally. We have to do it across borders and boundaries. Language endangerment and language revitalization do not respect national borders, and neither should we in our sharing of resources and information.

8:07And so I do want to highlight a few of the broad areas in which this work is being done. And so obviously digital activism via social media is one of the key areas that we're going to see more of throughout this international decade, I hope. These are recognized as a key part of supporting languages online. Digital activism plays a significant role in processes of language revitalization, using ICT to increase the visibility of indigenous languages and populations, and importantly, to combat the stigma of indigenous languages as lacking or unsuitable for the modern era.

8:46This is a favorite stereotype of those who oppose the maintenance of linguistic diversity, that some languages simply are not fit for the modern world or digital use or whatever, and by bringing languages into the digital sphere, you are proving by the existence of digital tools for these languages that that is nonsense. And so there are just a beautiful number of social media initiatives across all platforms doing this sort of language learning and awareness work.

9:16So on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, Speak Gwich'in to me is just making amazing content highlighting and teaching Gwich'in language. Ian McCallum on Twitter is also posting wonderful content in Lenape for Lenape language learning, especially around plants and weather and everyday life. Instagram has an incredible proliferation of language learning accounts, including Learn Cornish, among many others.

9:47And Facebook also, tons and tons of language activism, awareness raising, and learning happening on Facebook, like this content from the Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle, commemorating the recent tragic discovery of the remains of 215 children at a Canadian residential school. we will come back to the use of social media beyond just disseminating information about languages right most of us when we use social media it's not purely for the consumption of information we're doing something else there so we'll come back to that as well Obviously, information access is a really key point in the development of information technologies for under-resourced languages.

10:32And in addition to making information available to people in their own languages, wikis can serve as sort of a nurturing space for languages that are just beginning to be used on the Internet. It's a space where people have a common goal, a purpose, and something to do in language online rather than just create content without quite knowing why they're doing it. And so I'm really looking forward to hearing more about different wiki initiatives in different languages at this conference. It also is worth highlighting computational tools, what I as a non-computational linguist might call hard computational tools.

11:11uh this work is increasingly taking up the important labor of providing tools and resources for languages other than just the few largest ones we have plenty of morphological parsers for english and spanish and russian and very few for other languages but really in the last decade or less we've seen computational linguists turn their attention to providing these tools for less resourced languages and importantly we're also seeing a lot more computational linguists being trained and beginning to work from indigenous language communities and non-dominant language which communities globally.

11:54And of course, language technology is crucial for a lot of language learning initiatives. There are a huge and growing number of useful digital tools to support learners of languages. These are just a small handful of the ones that are out there. I'm looking forward to learning more about what y'all are working on. But all this said, technology obviously presents a lot of opportunities and potential supports for sustaining languages. But I do want to address the fact that it also presents risks and challenges for these languages and these risks and challenges have perhaps been discussed behind closed doors but they are beginning to be spoken of and addressed more openly among folks working in providing language resources for indigenous and under resourced languages and this could broadly fall under the heading of data sovereignty of digital colonialism, of intellectual property rights. Broadly speaking, when we're doing this

12:58work to create language technology for Indigenous and less resourced languages, we don't want to replicate the same structures of injustice that have caused these languages to be marginalized in the first place. We don't want to replicate the same colonial systems online. And this is something that Dr. Tataka Keegan, a Maori computational linguist, speaks really eloquently about in a lot of his work. And so, coming together when we're engaged in this type of work, to clearly establish terms around issues like data sovereignty, who has the rights to access or control this information, who owns the intellectual property to the language tools we're developing, and to really make sure that we're responding to the existing needs and goals of language communities.

13:47this isn't just a nice idea if we have time for it in the development cycle right this is not something you can tack on to the beginning or end of a language technology project and brush aside if it doesn't quite fit in this is a crucial necessary fundamental part of doing this work in a useful sustainable and ethical way and yeah it's not that we can't do this work because there are too many ethical barriers or potential missteps it simply means that we have to come together to discuss them that we have to take the time to listen to one another and learn from each other's hard-won lessons right there are lots of people who have been doing this work who have already encountered the setbacks that you don't want to replicate take the time to listen to them and learn from them and on the other hand we want to gain inspiration from the successes that folks have already had, right?

14:45This can be very challenging and sometimes demoralizing work, and really taking the time to look at successes can provide us a lot of strength to keep going. And of course, coming together to talk about this stuff allows us to draw on everyone's different strengths. Even within the tech sphere, everyone's going to have different technical skills, people are going to have different types of innovation and creativity, And people are going to be coming at this from different cultural viewpoints and ways of thinking about language technology.

15:16And I assume all of us here at Contribu Ling will agree diversity of thought as well as of language is a strength. And perhaps most importantly, at least to me as a sociolinguist, it's the coming together that lets us form relationships around our language work that keep us going through this very challenging work. This is long-term, difficult, very demanding stuff that we're engaged in. And it's relationships with other people and other practitioners that help us keep going.

15:51And remember what I said about how most of us don't get on social media just to consume or disseminate information? We get on social media to form community of a sort, to form at least parasocial, if not deeply social, relationships. because like we said, this can be really profoundly lonely work. Building resources and capacity for indigenous or less resourced languages. It's really easy to feel like you are the only one in your academic department or company or community or province or even your whole country who really cares about keeping languages strong and upholding language rights.

16:30It can be very isolating stuff. But you're definitely not alone. There is a beautiful and growing community of practitioners around the world who are working alongside you in this. All you have to do is go out there and meet them and talk to them. So some of us are lucky enough to have a shortcut to this type of community. We have the right passports and the funding and all that other stuff to attend physical gatherings that bring together practitioners in language tech and revitalization.

17:04Here are just a few of them. You know, maybe you've been to or heard of ICLDC or Computel or America's NLP. There are workshops and conferences like this where people have the chance to gather physically and exchange these ideas and experiences. And one of these was Jalicet Tesquale, which was hosted by the First People's Cultural Council in Victoria a couple of years ago. This was a very large international gathering of more than a thousand indigenous language practitioners from around the world.

17:35And Dr. Lorna Williams, the former chair of the First Peoples Cultural Council, spoke about this in hindsight. She said, let us help each other. Gathering together lifted the spirits of the people so that they could continue doing the amazing, incredible, life-giving work that they're doing in their communities. we need to be able to share our knowledges the ways we've created to save our languages thank you thank you dr williams for putting it that way because that's really what i'm trying to say gathering lifts our spirits and gives us what we need to keep doing this stuff and obviously access to these types of physical gatherings is really unequal i have the right passport and I have had departmental funding and I've had the luck to know when and how to apply and the English language to present at these events, but that is not a given for most people.

18:32And so this was actually a conversation I had this morning with Friedrich Leupke, a linguist on Twitter, that physical mobility is never an option for most scholars from the global south. And so we have an opportunity now, especially with the onset of COVID and the broad shift to digital work, to build more inclusive platforms for exchange like this one. And so I do want to take a moment to tell you a little bit about something ELP is doing in this vein right now.

19:07And this is something that we are very tentatively calling a revitalization help desk. I know that sounds like some sort of software support service. Not quite that, but the idea is that people working in language revitalization and technology in different parts of the world often feel like they're working in isolation. We get a lot of emails like this from different language practitioners, you know, I think I may be the only one in my country who really cares about our languages.

19:37It can be very isolating. but the point of the revitalization help desk is not only to connect language champions with digital information and resources to support their work but more importantly to connect them with each other right to provide a digital community an online gathering space for folks who may not have that physical mobility but who really do want to connect with other folks working in this same sphere. Because, you know, if you're working in language revitalization or maintenance, it's really easy to get confused about where to start, where to go next, what to do, how to address various challenges, and there is a lot of good information out there.

20:23But again, there are these significant barriers to access, not least of which is paywalls or the language the information is in itself. If you are not an English speaker, you are cut off from a lot of the most useful information about language revitalization. And so that's part of what I urge all of you to assist with is, again, increasing access to this type of information about language maintenance and language support.

20:55And so the revitalization help desk will include, broadly speaking, a place to connect, right, discussion forums for language champions from all different parts of the world to share their stories of language work, to discuss their goals, to exchange ideas and to form, hopefully, supportive personal relationships and professional working collaborations to provide encouragement and support to one another.

21:26It's also going to provide free multilingual information and webinars on the topic of language documentation and revitalization. It will feature what we're calling language stories, which is first-hand experiences from folks doing this type of work. And if you'd be interested in sharing your stories of your own work with your language, please get in touch. I would love to talk to you. And finally, the help desk component itself aims to connect folks with someone experienced and educated in language revitalization.

22:01not necessarily academics, but experienced language revitalization and maintenance practitioners who can really provide a little bit of a helping hand for folks who are stuck or confused. And I have linked a longer talk about the help desk there if you want to check it out. And so I really just want to invite all of you to join us in gathering together online to support our languages and to provide the resources and knowledge and most importantly the community that we need to do this work well in the long term it's hard it's challenging it's time consuming and it can be lonely but all of us will do better and find greater success and most importantly enjoy the work more If we can come together to share our ideas and knowledge. So please, please get in touch if you are interested in participating or sharing your knowledge or experiences, or if you need resources translated into your language, or the language of a community you work with, we'd be happy to talk and hear more from you.

23:10So thank you so much for your attention and thank you for being here to share what you're doing to support languages online. Thank you. Mahalo. Masi. Akeva.

Source and licence

Recording: File:ContribuLing 2021 Keynote speech by Anna Belew.webm by Anna Belew (2021-06-03), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.