North Sámi, Kalaallisut and Inuktitut are all endangered languages with less than 100.000 speakers. But new technologies are making them more accessible and could help preserve them.
Across the world, 1.46 billion people own an iPhone. Recently, all of them received an update to their phone that has the potential to bring them closer to the Arctic.
Simply head to “Keyboard Settings” and press “Add New Keyboard”, Apple, the company behind the iPhone, writes. If you do, you can enable typing in several variants of Sámi, the language spoken by the Sámi people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
The feature may seem simple, but it had been long-awaited and developed through a collaboration between the Saami Council, the Arctic University of Norway, and Apple. The goal is clear; to help Sámi language, officially an endangered language according to UNESCO, survive into the future.
“The impact of the majority languages is strong. Many Sámi children and young people live outside the traditional Sámi territories, where the transfer of Sámi languages is not as natural as it is in more central Sámi areas,” Aslak Holmberg, president of the Saami Council, said in a press release.
Sámi language learning and gaming apps
Aside from the new keyboard, the Saami Council is making other efforts to integrate the Sámi language into the 21st century. It helped create, for instance, a language learning app called IndyLan, which makes smaller languages available for learners; languages not available through popular language learning apps like Duolingo.
It also supported a Sámi version of an adventure game for phones called Raanaa – The Shaman Girl. In it, you control a character who jumps from floating platform to floating platform while collecting points, all the while a voice is talking to you in the melodic Sámi language.
“There is a need for arenas to hear and speak Sámi languages,” Aslak Holmberg said.
Translations in a multilingual Greenland
In Greenland, too, new technologies are providing unexpected benefits. Its language, Kalaallisut, is also classified by UNESCO as endangered, and for a long time its small size has meant it was not a top priority for tech companies. Despite being the country’s official language, it is, as an example, not one of the 133 languages supported by translation service Google Translate.
In a country where most government communication is published in both Kalaallisut and Danish, translations are a valuable commodity. Millions are spent on translations each year by the country’s institutions.
Efforts have been made to automatize translations; since 2010, an online dictionary has been available, and recently, the country’s language secretariat published its own automatic translation tool. However, both of them only worked between Danish and Kalaallisut, and both of them had shortcomings.
It is not an overstatement to say that reliable online language tools have been sparse in Greenland. Until last year. Because the emergence of AI and large language models like ChatGPT have brought changes to the availability of Greenlandic language.
Impressive Kalaallisut translations
With ChatGPT, unlike Google Translate, users are not limited to certain pre-set languages. They can simply paste a text into it and see if it knows the language. And, as it turns out, when you post a text in Kalaallisut, it produces impressive results.
“These large language models have been trained on so much data that they can calculate what is the most likely word to be in a context. It could eventually become so good that it could actually provide some quite valid translations,” Signe Ravn-Højgaard, media researcher at the University of Greenland told KNR.
To test this statement, KNR – Greenlandic television – tested ChatGPT on two texts in Kalaallisut, translating them into Danish. This experiment impressed the Greenlandic speaking editor-in-chief of KNR, Jens Thorin.
“It is very impressive that it can translate so well. I am surprised that the longer sentences are so well rendered in Danish. However, there are some places where it falters,” he said.
Most of the faults occurred when trying to translate texts into Kalaallisut, a language with an entirely different syntax that the AI models are not used to. Because of this, Jens Thorin did not expect AI to replace human translators. Not yet.
Inuktitut and Microsoft
Across the Baffin Bay in Canada, efforts have also been made to preserve an endangered Arctic language through technology. With just about 40.000 speakers Inuktitut, the language spoken by Inuits in Nunavut and surrounding provinces, is also classified by UNESCO as endangered.
To fight the decline of the language, in 2021, the Government of Nunavut launched a cooperation with another large technology company: Microsoft. And again, the object of the project was translations as the language was added to Microsoft Translator.
“For thousands of years, Inuit have spoken Inuktitut across the world. It’s amazing how we have kept Inuktitut strong by adapting to changes in our culture. Embracing new technology is a perfect example of our resilience. Adding Inuktitut to Microsoft Translator is a great accomplishment and it shows how collaboration with Microsoft makes a positive and lasting difference in the future of our language,” Margaret Nakashuk, Minister of Culture and Heritage in the Government of Nunavut said on that occasion.
Also in Nunavut, an attempt was made to write songs in Inuktitut using ChapGPT’s AI. The resulting song was named ‘Gitaralauq Sulusiaq’, meaning ‘guitar players, let’s dance’, and replicated the style of musician David Bowie.
The Sámi version of Frozen
Back in the lands of the Sámi, though their language is linguistically different, their battle for language preservation is the same. It is a battle that can be aided by emerging technologies, but most of all takes persistence and, perhaps, creativity.
And in the Saami Council, they work on many fronts. Not least in 2020, when the new Disney movie Frozen 2 came out. It is a movie taking place in frozen Arctic lands and which was inspired by Sámi traditions. So, for the second installment of the movie, the council cooperated with Disney to produce a version in Sámi that came out in cinemas at the same time as versions in other languages, something entirely new.
Maybe this was what Aslak Holmberg, president of the Saami Council, was thinking of when he commented on the new iPhone feature.
“We hope to have a vibrant Sámi society with a strong culture and many natural arenas for speaking Sámi languages. We see a lot of growth potential, for example in Sámi film,” he said.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal
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