How AI and immersive technology is being used to revitalize Indigenous languages

Researchers on Vancouver Island are working on innovative ways, including artificial intelligence and immersive technology, to revitalize Indigenous languages.

Sara Child has been working to revive her language, Kwak'wala, on northern Vancouver Island.

According to estimates by the First People Cultural Council in B.C., there are only about 140 speakers fluent in Kwak'wala across more than a dozen First Nations.

Child, a Kwagu'ł band member and professor in Indigenous education at North Island College, says most of the speakers in her community are in their 70s and 80s. 

She created the Sanyakola Foundation, which works with elders to find ways of passing on the language. 

The language, she says, is inextricably linked to the land and wellness, and requires different ways of learning. 

"After decades of being forcibly disconnected from the land and our lifestyle changes, many of our elders, the language of the land is trapped in their memories," Child said. 

"And so we spent hours of work working with elders, trying to unlock that knowledge of the language of the land."

Child realized the need to tap into the vast archives of recordings of Kwak'wala gathered by anthropologists and other researchers over nearly a century.

With funding from MITACS, a government-funded non-profit that supports innovation, they are working to develop an artificial intelligence machine that will comb through those recordings and transcribe the language into usable resources. 

"If we try to do it manually, it could take a whole team of people a virtual lifetime to transcribe it and rewrite it and get it into a usable format," Child said. 

Most voice-to-text technologies are developed for English. While English is noun-based, many Indigenous languages like Kwak'wala are verb-centred, forcing researchers to develop their own recognition system from scratch.

The work can be challenging, but the potential reward could be huge. 

"By building the technology tool, the speech recognition tool, we can tap into that amazing resource that will help us recapture and reclaim language that is trapped in archives," Child said.