How can NLP Help Revitalize Endangered Languages? A Case Study and Roadmap for the Cherokee Language

Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers, pages 1529 - 1541 May 22-27, 2022 c⃝2022 Association for Computational Linguistics How can NLP Help Revitalize Endangered Languages? A Case Study and Roadmap for the Cherokee Language Shiyue Zhang, Benjamin E. Frey, and Mohit Bansal UNC Chapel Hill {shiyue, mbansal}@cs.unc.edu; benfrey@email.unc.edu Abstract More than 43% of the languages spoken in the world are endangered, and language loss cur- rently occurs at an accelerated rate because of globalization and neocolonialism. Saving and revitalizing endangered languages has become very important for maintaining the cultural di- versity on our planet. In this work, we focus on discussing how NLP can help revitalize endan- gered languages. We first suggest three princi- ples that may help NLP practitioners to foster mutual understanding and collaboration with language communities, and we discuss three ways in which NLP can potentially assist in language education. We then take Cherokee, a severely-endangered Native American lan- guage, as a case study. After reviewing the lan- guage’s history, linguistic features, and exist- ing resources, we (in collaboration with Chero- kee community members) arrive at a few mean- ingful ways NLP practitioners can collaborate with community partners. We suggest two ap- proaches to enrich the Cherokee language’s re- sources with machine-in-the-loop processing, and discuss several NLP tools that people from the Cherokee community have shown interest in. We hope that our work serves not only to in- form the NLP community about Cherokee, but also to provide inspiration for future work on endangered languages in general.1 1 Introduction There are an estimated 6000 to 7000 spoken lan- guages in the world, and at least 43% of them are endangered.2 Throughout history, languages have naturally shifted and declined into dormancy. The current speed of language loss, however, is far beyond “natural”. Some linguists estimate that between 50% and 90% of languages will be 1Our code and data will be open-sourced at https:// github.com/ZhangShiyue/RevitalizeCherokee. 2http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/en/ statistics.html severely endangered or dead by the end of this cen- tury (Austin and Sallabank, 2011). This acceler- ation of language endangerment owes largely to cultural, political, and economic marginalization and the rise of global imperialism. Worldwide, in- digenous people have suffered from colonization or conquest and given up their mother tongues in favor of another language. In order to achieve a higher social status, indigenous people have had to capitulate to colonizers’ linguistic norms. Follow- ing Ladefoged (1992), we acknowledge that bur- dens such as raw material survival outweigh the more abstract concerns of maintaining a language. In other words, we cannot blame or fault indige- nous people for giving up their languages in order to secure a better life under intense socioeconomic pressures. As linguists and NLP researchers, we have the responsibility to address these power im- balances and create a society where space exists for indigenous languages. Moreover, language loss is memory loss, identity loss, culture loss, and knowl- edge loss, and it even affects the health of indige- nous …

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