Treasures from the archive: The new life of traditional language-learning material in modern technology

Presented by Vivien Fröhlich at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 In the 1990s and early 2000s, speakers of several Alaska Native languages created language courses in collaboration with the Yukon Native Language Centre. These can be found as digital files on the Alaska Native Language Archive’s website today. A current collaboration between Doyon Foundation, an Alaska Native organization whose mission is to provide educational, career and cultural opportunities to enhance the identity and quality of life for Doyon shareholders, and 7000 Languages, a non-profit organization that supports Indigenous and endangered languages communities to create language- learning materials, uses this data to create online language-learning materials that can be used in the classroom or as standalone online courses. The written material and recordings of the past are used to build these courses on the Transparent Language Online platform that are then tailored to the needs of the learners in the Doyon region using the most appropriate of the around 40 different language-learning activities the software offers, including: video players, conversation-based, matching, and slideshow activities. Using this approach, no new content had to be created, instead the voices from the past, of whom some have already passed away, can still be used to teach the ancestral languages. In 2023 we successfully created five language-learning courses for Alaska Native languages, namely for Upper Tanana, Tanacross, Benhti Kenaga’, Denaakk’e, and Inupiaq, which can now be used by teachers in the classroom, as standalone courses for asynchronous language learners, or as a resource for non-Native teachers who teach Native languages giving them the possibility to reuse the audio files in lessons which are tailored to their students’ needs without having to either record themselves or find a Native speaker to record – which is, in fact, not possible anymore for some of these languages as there are no first language speakers left.