This week we're going to be working with
a morphology of an indigenous language.
This language is called BriBri. It's
an indigenous language from Costa Rica,
and before we do that, I wanted to talk to
you a little bit about indigenous
languages, language revitalization, and
our role with technology and revitalization.
How we can make it so that these
languages are spoken by their community
members, and that maybe they can use
their phones in their languages so that
they can incorporate their languages in
more domains of their daily life? So the
summary before we start, is that yes,
languages are born, languages die, for example,
nobody speaks Latin anymore, it
transformed into Spanish, Italian, French,
Portuguese and that's fine, however in
the present world we have a situation where
have a few super large languages like
English like Spanish and thousands of
smaller languages, mostly indigenous
languages, that could be spoken by as few
as one or two people. Imagine if only
like one eighty year old person spoke
English that's what's happening on a
very large scale. This situation is
unfortunately human-made. This happened
because nation-states, empires decided to
make their territories linguistically
uniform to unite us around one country,
one flag, and one language. Unfortunately
this process involves violence and
coercion, so that people who spoke
minority languages would abandon them in
favor of the super large languages such
as English and Spanish. Minority languages
should be preserved because of the role
they have in people's lives. Imagine if
all the sudden someone told you you
can't speak English anymore and then you
can't speak in English to your parents,
you can't say I love you to your parents
in the language you always spoke to them,
that's what's at stake here. People construct
their identities through language and
telling them that they now have to
abandon this identity is something that
might be undesirable to any human being.
The process of making sure that people
don't stop speaking these languages with
this language revitalization is
difficult but there are many successful
efforts going on all over the planet so
it is possible and technology can help
us. It can help us create environments
for learning the languages that can help
us create communities where the speakers
of the language can continue to
communicate with them through technology,
through chat and so forth and in this
as computer scientists and programmers,
we do have a role to play. This is a map
of Arizona and it's probably not the map
of Arizona you're used to seeing. This is a map of
all the indigenous communities in
Arizona. There's a lot of diversity on
planet Earth but a lot of it is erased
from our view to present a more uniform
version. The map of Arizona you're probably used
to just has like Tucson, Phoenix, Sedona,
the Grand Canyon, but underneath that
there's a ton of linguistic variation
and as you can see of many different
communities. This is probably what our
world looked like before there were like
large nation states, for example. Where
there were many groups that spoke many
different languages, now are our world is
different. We have just a few languages
that are spoken by tens of millions of
people, hundreds of millions of people.
This is parallel to what we see in the
natural world, where 80 to 100 years
ago, we had many varieties of vegetables,
of fruits, but in the present world we
have many fewer varieties of all of
these. With the reduction of species and
the reduction of the environment we've
also seen a reduction in linguistic
diversity throughout planet Earth, and as
a matter of fact places with a lot of
ecological diversity as shown in the map
are also places with a large linguistic
diversity.
So something is happening on planet Earth. Unfortunately what's happening is
that people want to build unified nation
states and in doing so demand that
everyone speaks the same language so
that we can be one people. When they do
that, they tend to get violent.
This illustration on the right says
speak French be clean, clean like you're
dirty if you speak something else. There
was a campaign in France in the 1800s
called the shaming, the public shaming, to
shame speakers of other languages into
speaking French, to shame them publicly
so much so that there were many large
languages in France like Occitan
for example that have almost disappeared
because French has taken over all of the
country. On the upper left, we have a
Welsh not, but this is -
there's a kind of pendant that teachers
had so you have to speak English in
school but if they caught you speaking
Welsh, they would put it around your neck.
The only way you could get it off of you
would be to find some other kids
speaking Welsh and rat them
out and to put it on their neck and
whoever was wearing it at the end of the day
got a beating. This is a hougenfuda.
This - the one on the lower left is
the exact same thing but for Japan. It
was used in Okinawa so if someone was
caught speaking Okinawan instead of
standard Japanese, they would get it. 
And at the end of the day, beating.
Unfortunately people have been beaten all
over planet Earth, beaten into speaking
the majority languages. And in Latin
America, we had awful things. They
would make - they would beat children, they
would make them kneel onto bottle caps,
there was an incredibly painful process
and this made it so that, imagine that
happened to you in school where they
would beat you for speaking something
they would make you kneel over corn
kernels like popcorn kernels, how painful
would that be? Would you want -
want that for your children? Who would
want that for their children? The first
reason why languages are lost is
voluntary change, where parents have
suffered this and then they don't want
their children to suffer the same
punishments. There were schools here in
the US, where as you can see, they would
take humiliating pictures of people who
are Native American and then show them
transformed into like a good and useful
person, and tell them that you know your
children must speak English because this
is the language where they're going to
get their sustenance, and so forth. Of
course if you - if you beat someone and
deny them their culture, and deny them their
world, of course they're going to
think that you should speak English. A
second reason why languages are lost is
forced change where there are explicit
laws that force you to speak a language.
This happened in Spain during the 20th
century. Where in the dictatorship that
they had in between the 1930s and the
1970s, let minority languages like
Catalan and Basque were brusquely
oppressed. If they caught you singing in
Catalan you could go to prison. If they
caught you teaching any of these
languages, you could go to prison as well.
So there would be explicit laws against
using anything that was not Spanish.
Finally of course loss of population can
kill language off like genocide like
killing everyone on an island, like
having bounties or - over heads of an
entire population, like happened in
Tasmania for example, and parts of California.
So languages can be lost for all of
these reasons because people are
convinced that they need to speak
English because people are forced by law
to speak English, or because indigenous
communities suffer genocides. When this
happens, when languages die, and we don't
say die anymore, by the way, we say that
languages go dormant, because hopefully
there will be a possibility in the
future to reawaken them, so when people
stop speaking languages many things are
lost. Traditional knowledge about the
world for example, ecological knowledge,
knowledge about the possibilities of the
human mind. There's many ways in which
human language can work which are not
present in English, Spanish, French, for
example. Human diversity
for example, obviously diversities in
point of view, and how people organize
themselves, but maybe the most important
reason why languages should be preserved
and revitalized: it's because of
indigenous sovereignty. It's because it
it allows people to tell their own
stories in their own way and to preserve
their agency and their voice. Sovereignty
is a very precious thing for indigenous
communities and keeping their language
is a part of expressing that. Make - being
able to project my being the way I want
it and to have the world talk to me in
my language is to them an expression of
indigenous sovereignty. How is language
lost? Languages are lost when they are
displaced from domains of usage. For
example if you are texting in English
with your cell phone then you're going
to use English but what if you suddenly
had to use some other language when
you're texting? That's going to reduce
the circumstances when you're using - in
which you're using your language? What if
you suddenly had to watch movies in a
different language, or read the newspaper
in a different language, or watch the
news in a different language? The
opportunities to use your own language
would be further and further reduced to
maybe use just your family. What if
suddenly your younger siblings spoke a
different language and you could only
use your language with elderly people.
for example? As each of these domains is
lost, people start using the language
less and less to a point where there's -
there's gonna be at some point a
generation that does not speak the
language at all and when that happens
only parents will speak the language.
After 20 years only grandparents will
speak the language
and after a time only very elderly
people are going to speak the language.
And after they die you're going to - the
language is going to become dormant, 
again it doesn't die, because there might
be documents or the probability of
bringing it back to life at some point.
But it will go dormant because nobody
actively speaks it. How can we stop this
from happening? Government, for example
can help by issuing language policies
and making sure that the language is
used in the government, for example and
the courts for making law, and so forth.
But mostly language can be revitalized
through community led efforts, through
grassroots - grassroot efforts, through
bilingual schools for example. Children
learn both languages English and
Hawaiian for example through something
called language nests where you place
children with grandparents or elderly
people so that the language can be
transmitted through them, through
master-apprentice where that's looking
for someone who speaks the language and
that can take you as an apprentice and you
can speak it together. And technology can
help with this process, we can help in
making, for example, language learning
tools from websites to apps and so forth.
By the way many many communities have
different feelings about whether
outsiders should learn the languages.
Some communities love it when outsiders
learn the language. That was the case in
Maori where we were all actively
encouraged to learn it. Some communities
in North America do not want outsiders
to learn the language and this is because
when outsiders have learned it, they have
abused the community. So there's an
unfortunate history where outside -
outsiders should not learn the language
unless explicitly permitted by community
members. If they have permission we can
create language learning tools, we can
use technology to help create speech
communities to help create circumstances
where people
use the language. For example people use
the Mexican language Zapotec on Twitter.
and they write on Twitter they write
their messages every day, and it's a way
to bring this language back into the
sphere of everyday life, helping create
interfaces in the language. And this is
mostly where we come in: natural language
processing can make it so that we create
speech recognition for the languages,
that we can provide predictive texting.
This is a phone also in the Zapotec
language, providing tools so that people
can create media, so that they can take
the people the things they love like
Star Wars and put them in their own
indigenous language. This is a language
called Tuscarora from New York and later
in the class I'll show you what Darth Vader
sounds like in Tuscarora.
When we try to use these languages in
some technological mean, we try to give
them some connotation of modernity and
them being part of our everyday world to
try to create a kind of symbolic impact
that will help younger speakers and
younger members of the community to
realize that yeah this language can
actually be used for cool stuff, like I
can actually use Navajo on my cell phone
for example, and what we should be trying
to create as opportunities for
interactions for people to use the
language actively. We will come back to
this topic in later videos and because
there's so many languages, there's a lot
of work to do. There's approximately
7,000 languages in the world,
most of them indigenous and there's
natural language resources for very few
of them, maybe a hundred. A low resource
language is one where there isn't a lot
of data for us to train language models,
so many of the magical things we can
make in the class with deep learning and
so forth, it's very difficult to use them
without any data. The field of low
resource languages and NLP is to try to
use the language that we have to make
these tools work. In general we're trying to
figure out how to make tools so that we
can - so that the speakers can
bring their languages back into their
everyday life. Again in summary, the
current situation with indigenous
languages where there's some super large
languages and thousands of smaller
languages on the verge of going dormant
is unfortunately human-made and we have
a lot of work to do to establish a world
where these languages are spoken and
thriving.
