Giellakafea

What we want to build

We believe that languages should bring people together. We want to help bring students and speakers together participating in an active collaborative process revitalizing their language, and we want to bring the endangered language communities of the world together to learn from and support each other. This initiative grew out of a language café for North Sámi, but we want to build a digital platform that can be used to aid in the revitalization of any language.

We want to support even the most severely endangered languages, regardless of whether they have existing documentation and content to draw from. And we want to build a platform that treats language revitalization as a community activity, bringing people together in a collaborative effort to ensure the survival of the language.

The way we see it, the natural solution to both of these concerns is to have both students and speakers on the platform together, rather than building a standard “language learning app” where students study the language alone through a curriculum. Students should be engaging with the language’s speakers through language cafés and other forms of real human interactions, building a community together, not just studying the language. Giellakafea’s role should be to support them and help them stay connected in between sessions, and their activity on the platform should produce language documentation to support communities struggling with language documentation.

How we’ll get there

We have a lot of exciting ideas, and we could spend years dreaming, designing, and building the “perfect” app. But we’d rather get something out quickly for real people to use, and we’d rather collaborate with the communities on our platform to help guide things in the direction that will help them the most. So we’ve decided to start small and we’ve picked out a small, manageable starting point that we can get out to real communities to use as quickly as possible. From there, we can take their feedback and suggestions into consideration when choosing our next steps.

If you’d like to hear about what we’re building right now, or if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to share, please reach out to us! We’re just starting out, and we want to make sure we’re building the things endangered language communities need most. It helps us to hear from as many perspectives as possible, so we’d love to have a chat and show you what we’ve built so far!