Exploring the Current State of Indigenous Languages

With Dwi Agus Erinita

1. In your view, what are the biggest opportunities and threats facing Indigenous Languages in today’s digital world?
   In my opinion, the digital era provides opportunities for the people, even in a smaller scope such as in villages, to participate in keeping their Indigenous language alive. This can be done through their daily activities, such as recording, saving, or sharing their Indigenous language in the form of digital products, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, or online dictionaries.
   The biggest threat for Indigenous languages in the digital world is the domination of foreign languages, such as English, Mandarin, and Korean which are widely used in social media. If Indigenous languages are not actively updated and used, those languages might be forgotten in the digital landscape. Young people are more used to using these foreign languages and in consequence, rarely use their Indigenous language, which might lead to the extinction of the Indigenous language.
2. How can digital tools—such as social media, mobile apps, or AI—be effectively used to preserve and promote Indigenous Languages?
   Digital tools such as social media, mobile applications, and artificial intelligence (AI) can be effectively benefitted in conserving Indigenous languages. Social media makes hashtag campaigns, videos, or memes in Indonesian Indigenous languages possible, which attracts the interest of the youth. Applications for language learning, including AI-based applications, such as chatbots and speech-to-text applications, might help teaching vocabularies and documenting the languages. In Indonesia, the Agency for Language Development and Cultivation has conducted strategic programmes such as dialect application (language mapping), the ViBa application (language vitality application), the development of the corpus of Indigenous languages (KODA), and Indonesian digital dictionary (KBBI) which entirely benefit from technology.
3. What role should governments, educational institutions, or international organizations play in supporting Indigenous language communities?
   The government, educational institutions, and international organisations all play strategic roles in supporting the conservation of Indigenous languages. The government needs to establish policies that set the use of Indigenous languages as mandatory in the primary education level in order to increase the learning quality of students. Some of the concrete actions taken in the past are the programmes of the Agency for Language Development and Cultivation for conserving Indigenous languages, such as mapping (languages, literatures, and scripts), conducting the revitalisation of Indigenous languages (RBD), providing government aid for Indigenous language and script conserving communities, holding Indigenous language film festivals, and adapting stories told in Indigenous languages to other forms of media.
4. Based on your experience, what are the most successful local or global initiatives that have helped revitalize Indigenous Languages?
   For me, the initiatives with visible results in the national scale is the Indigenous Language Revitalisation (RBD) programme which was conducted by the Agency for Language Development and Cultivation. This programme was conducted thanks to the synergy between the government, educational institutions, the (student) youth, and the community – in the active learning of Indigenous languages through Indigenous language-based trainings, competitions, and productions of creative works. This programme has been applied in 38 provinces across Indonesia at least up until 2024 and involved 12,645,234 students from 292,844 schools.
   In the global scale, the success of the revitalization of the Māori language in New Zealand through the policy of bilingual education and social media use has been an inspirational example. These two approaches show that the involvement of the people, supporting policies from the government, and benefiting technology are the keys to success in the revitalization of Indigenous languages.
5. What concrete steps can younger generations take to keep their Indigenous language alive—especially in increasingly digital and globalized societies?
   There are some ways for the youth to preserve their Indigenous languages:
   1. Creating and sharing digital contents such as writing social media posts, and making videos, podcasts, or blog posts in their Indigenous language.
   2. Developing or using Indigenous language learning applications, including AI-based applications such as speech-to-text applications and chatbots.
   3. Actively using Indigenous languages daily in communicating with family, friends, and their community.
   4. Participating in digital literacy trainings to increase their competence in creating and sharing digital contents using Indigenous languages, for example producing videos of folklores or documenting their Indigenous language online.
   5. Building digital communities or online forums that use Indigenous languages to interact, discuss, and share knowledge to keep their Indigeous language alive and strengthen the social solidarity among its speakers.