Promoting Endangered Languages with AI - IBM Research

Food for though!

To ponder:

1. Would the world not be a better place and more peaceful if we did not speak so many different languages? 
2. Or will machine translation really make us all understand each other better all the time at any time? We'll find out!
3. Will we be able to preserve some of the unwritten wisdom of minority people?

"Nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to go extinct by 2100. Now, large language models are being trained to document threatened languages and help encourage their use in everyday life." (Source)

"Today, Nheengatu, which translates to "good language" in English, is down to about 20,000 speakers and is on UNESCO’s list of “severely endangered” languages, meaning it’s no longer being passed down to most children. And it’s not the only language with a diminishing number of speakers. Nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to go extinct by 2100. To try and stave off their decline, the United Nations has declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. ...

Working with students at Brazil’s University of Campinas, IBM researchers recently built a prototype for an AI-powered writing assistant in Nheengatu. It’s a language that many students grew up hearing their parents and grandparents speak, but that most never learned to read or write. ..."

Promoting Endangered Languages with AI - IBM Research From about 1600 to 1800, Nheengatu was the lingua franca of the Amazon, one of 800 Indigenous languages spoken during the Portuguese colonization of Brazil. Linguistically, Nheengatu evolved as a way for Indigenous communities to communicate with the Portuguese — and each other.