Lakota Dictionary, Children’s Books in Apache, Crow Language Methods: Accessible via the Internet and smartphone, nearly dead Native American languages ​​are being reborn thanks to new technologies, with linguists dreaming of restoring the cultural identities of decimated indigenous peoples in North America.

Three women from the Apache Indian Reservation sit smiling in front of a computer and a microphone, searching their memories for dozens of words related to cooking and food.

To create an online Apache-English dictionary, they work with a software-developed method:Quick word collection” (RWC), whose algorithm searches written and audio databases to find forgotten words, define them, translate them into English, pronounce them in the correct tone and record them.

A 68-year-old teacher, Joycelene Johnson, and two colleagues have fun validating “Kapas” in Apache, which means “potato.”

This “Written language apps are good for learners who have a collection“Apache vocabulary and grammar,” explains Ms. Johnson. In the bilingual schools on their reservation there are “thousand students” But “Only one speaker in first grade who speaks fluently“.

This language workshop was one of many in a “International Conference on the Documentation, Education and Revitalization of Indigenous Languages” (ICILDER) last weekend at Indiana University in the central United States.

A meeting of some forty indigenous and Indian tribes and nations from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and New Zealand, attended by AFP a few days later in the idyllic setting of the city of Bloomington National Indigenous Peoples Day in the United States, where 6.8 million “natives” live, or 2% of the population.