Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1]
[0] Excerpt from the Truth and Reconciliation commission's report: http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-school..., also https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-resident...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-c..., https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/
I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation).
Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful.
For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...)
To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources.
[0] https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ [1] http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_...
For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things.
The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it.
So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture).
I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together!
I tend to agree, but I also respect the wishes of the various groups. They've undergone experiences at the hands of colonizers that I can't begin to imagine, and if they want to try to preserve something of their culture so that it stays in their culture, and not just let any outsider with a passing interest learn it, I support them in that. Though I do wish more were like the Cherokee Nation, which offers free online courses for anyone across various levels of Cherokee, also integrating culture and such.
It is actually illegal, as in there is a tribal resolution, for me to provide any demographic information to any entity without tribal permission.
The worst part is those folks who say they are Native American from a particular tribe and are NOT on that tribes enrollment rolls. They are always fun to deal with.