Students in Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., building app to preserve Inuinnaqtun language

Students at a school in Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., have teamed up with the British Columbia Institute of Technology to develop an app to help preserve the Inuinnaqtun language. 

An official language of both the N.W.T. and Nunavut, Inuinnaqtun is the primary Indigenous language spoken in Ulukhaktok and is also spoken in western Kitikmeot communities of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk and Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. 

But the small number of residents who speak it are growing older in both territories. In the N.W.T. alone, the territory said back in 2019 there were just 259 speakers.

That's part of the reason it became a topic of conversation at a parent-teacher night at Helen Kalvak School. David Leitch, a teacher there, said parents and students wanted to do more with the language and together they came up with the idea last year to create a simple translation app. 

"As soon as we got into it, the kids had some pretty fantastic ideas about what they wanted to do, and one of the biggest ones was they wanted to capture the voices of their elders." 

Leitch said students started working on the project this year, and it quickly exceeded his capacity for programming – but there was a big breakthrough when they reached out to the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) for help. A group of students in a computer technology program there agreed to take the project on, said Leitch, and they're creating a large language model – a type of artificial intelligence – that's learning Inuinnaqtun now. 

The app is being called Echo of the North and once it's done, Leitch said it'll translate full sentences and will also feature recordings of elders speaking. When someone asks the app for a translation, it'll use that large language model to respond.

Joanne Ogina, an elder in Ulukhaktok who has done some translations for the app, said she likes that it's preserving her language. She said Inuinnaqtun is rarely spoken, unless conversing with someone who is older. 

"I'm hoping that it revitalizes it, the speaking of it in our younger generation, because a lot of them rarely speak the language or even have a chance to hear it," she said. 

A lot more work to do

Leitch said now that BCIT is helping out, students in Ulukhaktok are focusing their time on interviewing elders, recording their voices, and also uploading "every bit" of Inuinnaqtun to the internet so the AI program can learn it.

"There's actually different dialects of Inuinnaqtun…. Depending on where you are or where you're from, where your family is from." 

To reflect those differences, Leitch said users will be able to flag a word in the app and add more information about how it's spelled or pronounced in another dialect – and those details will appear to users as well. 

Although students have been working hard on the project, Leitch said there's a long way yet to go. The artificial intelligence has learned the entire Inuinnaqtun dictionary but that means it can only translate word-for-word.

"To really function, it's going to take months and years of our students and our community and elders putting the language, the sentences, the sentence structure, into the database [so] that the AI can learn the language well enough to translate it," said Leitch.

"Every day it's getting better at translating full sentences."