Can an iPhone App Help Save an Endangered Language?

As Hinson began to learn the Chickasaw language, he found that native speakers were in perilously short supply. In December 2013, the last person on the planet who spoke only Chickasaw, Emily Johnson Dickerson, died at the age of 93 in her home in central Oklahoma. Less than 100 tribal members remained fluent in Chickasaw, although they could also speak English. All of these individuals were over the age of 60, and no one under 35 could speak conversational Chickasaw. None of the rest of the tribe’s 62,000 members knew more than a few words of Chickasaw. After months of searching, Hinson apprenticed himself to a fluent speaker of Chickasaw, ultimately leaving Texas to move back to the center of tribal life in Oklahoma in 2004. By 2007, tribal leaders had appointed him to direct a project to revitalize the Chickasaw language.

“My goal was to get more people proficient in Chickasaw as quickly as possible,” Hinson says.

Hinson wasn’t just fighting to preserve a fading language, he was also racing against time. To keep Chickasaw alive, Hinson not only had to teach children how to speak the language—he also had to convince them that it was worth speaking.

“Once parents stop teaching the language to their children, it becomes an extracurricular activity, particularly for youth,” Hinson says. “Language is up against softball and basketball and football.”

Languages also have to compete with technology. Digital media is becoming an integral part of Chickasaw life, just as it is in nearly every corner of the globe. But rather than pointing to technology as contributing to language loss, as some linguists have done for decades, Hinson decided to embrace technology as an opportunity. As someone who relies on the internet, he saw it as a potential route to success, not a barrier.

With the tribe’s backing, he began to build an online presence for his tribe—all in Chickasaw. Hinson’s efforts to revitalize the Chickasaw language are also reflected in a larger movement wherein speakers of endangered Indigenous languages are turning to digital technology to preserve their past and adapt to an ever-changing world. The latest technology may just provide a way to help save some of the world’s most threatened languages.

Languages have always cycled through their own stages of birth, change, and disappearance. As cultures move and evolve, interacting with the world around them, so do their languages. That languages shift and dominate other tongues isn’t necessarily a bad thing, explains Bernard Perley, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. What worries linguists and anthropologists isn’t simply that Indigenous languages are fading to silence but that so many are doing so at such a rapid rate. UNESCO, the U.N. division that works to protect the world’s culture and heritage, now estimates that half of the world’s 6,000 or more languages will no longer be spoken by 2100 if action isn’t taken to reverse this trend.

A language provides more than a way to communicate—it offers a unique worldview. It’s almost impossible to fully appreciate a group of people without understanding their language. When a language falls silent, both wisdom and basic information are often lost, such as knowledge about healing plants and natural disaster risks. (For example, even today, Navajo healers hunt among the towering buttes and rust-colored arroyos of the desert Southwest for a pop of bright purple from the tsédédééh, a flower used to treat mouth sores.) Language loss can also lead to the disappearance of more abstract concepts like Ilooibaa-áyya’shahminattook, the lyrical Chickasaw word meaning, “We used to gather together regularly, a long time ago.” Such losses cut a culture from its roots, setting its people adrift in a strange world.

Beginning in the late 1700s, policies enacted by the U.S. government attempted to do just that by actively seeking to eradicate the languages and cultures of Native Americans, who were deemed to be little more than “savages.” But even in the face of annihilation, as the Chickasaw Nation saw their numbers plummet due to disease and then were force-marched from their homeland in the Southeast to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, their language remained strong. It wasn’t until Native children were forced into boarding schools and forbidden to use their ancestral language that Chickasaw began to decline in earnest. This severing happened to Hinson’s great-grandparents in the 1920s.

“This had a terrible effect on Native American languages,” says Pamela Munro, an expert in Indigenous languages of the Americas at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Some parents became reluctant to pass on their language to their children.”

It is this history that has led to the dire circumstances many Indigenous languages in the U.S. face. Researchers are aware that speakers of Indigenous languages are dying out much more quickly than new speakers are being born, creating one of the classic scenarios of an endangered language. The professional call to arms occurred in 1992 when a series of papers published by the Linguistic Society of America brought international attention to the extent of worldwide language loss. As a result, professional linguists joined a global movement that used traditional ways of preserving languages while simultaneously searching for new methods. From a scholarly standpoint, the tactic made sense, but this approach wasn’t always what speakers themselves wanted or needed.

“Linguists are trained to write academic papers that tend to be quite technical and often don’t have applied uses,” says Lenore Grenoble, a linguist at the University of Chicago. “Even if you write a grammar of a language, it’s often too technical for speakers to use.”

Several Indigenous communities have cultivated linguists from their own groups and have begun to claim more power and authority over preserving their own languages. As a result, the larger global movement to save Indigenous languages has increasingly relied on community-based efforts. Hinson wasn’t a professional linguist, but he had a strong vision for how he wanted to rebuild a community of Chickasaw speakers. After nearly a decade of work, he knew enough Chickasaw to hold conversations as well as to read and write. He had made so much progress that he began working on a new, full-time project to help save his tribe’s language.

The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience. Language learners were paired with expert speakers in a master/apprentice program for immersive lessons that lasted several hours a day, five days a week. Hinson credits his ability to learn so much of the language in just a few years to this type of approach and to his own dogged determination. Under Hinson’s direction, the tribe also built an online television network with six different channels that include language lessons, cultural events, and oral histories. The movement rapidly gathered a strong social media following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Television and social media worked wonders for sparking interest in learning Chickasaw, but they didn’t always help with the day-in, day-out needs of students like Hinson who were trying to incorporate the language into their daily lives. In most cases, this is where the master/apprentice course would take over. However, given the small number of fluent Chickasaw speakers, many of whom were aging, Hinson knew that over time the master/apprentice program alone wouldn’t be enough to reach a sufficient proportion of the Chickasaw Nation’s members to help the language endure.

Hinson agrees that the app and programs he and the Chickasaw tribe have created aren’t a cure-all. Instead, he sees them as a spark to help light the fire to maintain the traditional language. His vision doesn’t require that every single Chickasaw citizen become fluent in Chickasaw, but it does require that large numbers of them value the language and provide resources to maintain the apps and other technologies.

“An app won’t make you a proficient speaker, but it can help you learn the language,” Hinson says.

These high-tech solutions have also influenced the way many speakers view their own language. Before, some speakers of Indigenous languages perceived their mother tongue as a relic of a bygone era. The insertion of the language into new technologies and contexts, however, makes it seem shiny and new—like something relevant to the technological era. This will likely help today’s children pass the language on to their own children. A language’s transmission is key to keeping it alive, many linguists say.

For his part, Hinson continues to develop other language technologies for the Chickasaw to use. Recently, the tribe partnered with the popular language-learning software company Rosetta Stone to create a series of 80 Chickasaw lessons. Rosetta Stone has already created similar lessons for the Navajo and Mohawk communities.

“It’s a constant process of creating new speakers,” says Hinson. “When this generation has its own kids, then we’ll know if it’s working.” His children are soaking up their language and its surrounding culture. Hinson says it’s their intention to teach their own children Chickasaw someday.

“My dream is that as an old man, people will come up to me and say they’ve decided to teach their children Chickasaw.”

This article was republished on discovermagazine.com and scientificamerican.com.