The Internet Is Helping Save Forgotten Languages
Technology now lets us document and preserve indigenous speech
It was shortly after the birth of his son that Daryl Baldwin decided to tidy up his attic. While rooting around, he found a pile of papers that had belonged to his grandfather and appeared to be written in a language he didn’t recognize.
“I looked at the notes and thought, yeah, of course we’ve got a language,” Baldwin says. “I didn’t know whether there were any speakers of it. The only language I’d been exposed to was place names and things like that.”
The language turned out to be Myaamia, one of the thousands of ancestral and more or less extinct languages across the globe. The Americas and Australia are distinctive in that their original languages were lost as a result of colonialism and deliberate cultural destruction — perhaps one of the reasons Baldwin and a growing group of indigenous people feel so strongly about keeping their languages alive.
“In our case, the Myaamia language, which is governed by a community led by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, it’s driven by a need to maintain group identity,” Baldwin tells me. “Language is one of the drivers of identity. It may be that these languages never become languages of power per se, languages of economics or politics, but for…
