4 ms·

Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more can

by disown 6y ago

Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered. Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?

unhammer 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut says about 550 mother tongue speakers of that dialect, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut as a whole has between 35.000 and 40.000 mother tongue speakers (and there are programs regarding Inuktitut at least https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spread_the_inuit_language_train_the_instructors/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spre... )
protomyth 6y ago
Every tribe is working very hard on language preservation and some are getting much better results than others. Some have been lost, but the folks in Alaska are putting a lot of effort into it. I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
- yorwba 6y ago
  It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation). Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful. For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...) To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77 https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
  - protomyth 6y ago
    It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      Maybe you can do a dual-use project, where, if the ML part turns out to be not that useful, at least the data you collected or the baseline model you developed have a positive impact as well.
- lastofthemojito 6y ago
  Supposedly there's an Inuttitut Rosetta Stone project although I don't see much else about it online. [0] I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources. [0] https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ [1] http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_Form.pdf http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_...
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    > but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources. For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things. The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it. So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
    - lastofthemojito 6y ago
      I remember when I first read about the Treaty of Wangxia being shocked that one of items in the treaty was that China would revoke a law that made it illegal for outsiders to learn Chinese. [0] The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture). I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wanghia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wanghia
- zeestar 6y ago
  I responded. I must be on ghost mode.
cmonagle 6y ago
The decline of Inuktut wasn't principally caused by displacement or natural population decline, but rather the residential school system that attempted to completely assimilate young Inuit (and other indigenous) kids. Children were systematically removed from their communities and sent to English (sometimes French) religious boarding schools. They were physically punished for speaking their mother language. [0] Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1] [0] Excerpt from the Truth and Reconciliation commission's report: http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-schools-did-to-aboriginal-languages http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-school..., also https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-residential-schools-system-officially-established https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-resident... [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-can-2016-census-1.4370876 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-c..., https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/ https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/

by disown 6y ago

unhammer 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut says about 550 mother tongue speakers of that dialect, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut as a whole has between 35.000 and 40.000 mother tongue speakers (and there are programs regarding Inuktitut at least https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spread_the_inuit_language_train_the_instructors/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spre... )

protomyth 6y ago

Every tribe is working very hard on language preservation and some are getting much better results than others. Some have been lost, but the folks in Alaska are putting a lot of effort into it. I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.

yorwba 6y ago
It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation). Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful. For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...) To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77 https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
- protomyth 6y ago
  It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Maybe you can do a dual-use project, where, if the ML part turns out to be not that useful, at least the data you collected or the baseline model you developed have a positive impact as well.
lastofthemojito 6y ago
Supposedly there's an Inuttitut Rosetta Stone project although I don't see much else about it online. [0] I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources. [0] https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ [1] http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_Form.pdf http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_...
- dorchadas 6y ago
  > but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources. For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things. The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it. So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
  - lastofthemojito 6y ago
    I remember when I first read about the Treaty of Wangxia being shocked that one of items in the treaty was that China would revoke a law that made it illegal for outsiders to learn Chinese. [0] The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture). I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wanghia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wanghia
zeestar 6y ago
I responded. I must be on ghost mode.

cmonagle 6y ago

The decline of Inuktut wasn't principally caused by displacement or natural population decline, but rather the residential school system that attempted to completely assimilate young Inuit (and other indigenous) kids. Children were systematically removed from their communities and sent to English (sometimes French) religious boarding schools. They were physically punished for speaking their mother language. [0] Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1] [0] Excerpt from the Truth and Reconciliation commission's report: http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-schools-did-to-aboriginal-languages http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-school..., also https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-residential-schools-system-officially-established https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-resident... [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-can-2016-census-1.4370876 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-c..., https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/ https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/