Can technology help save endangered languages?

Interview with Kevin Scannell

​Can technology help in preserving endangered languages? What resources should be focused on and how can language leaders come together to combine efforts? Breizh Amerika met with American academic, Kevin Scannell from the Saint Louis University in Missouri to learn about his work and insights. (view video)

Prof Kevin Scannell works with linguists from around the world to help build an online presence of their native language. His work with Gmail, Twitter and WhatsApp helps provide Irish localisations for software products and he has developed an Irish spell checker, grammar checker and thesaurus, as well as dictionaries and translation engines that support Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic. He has also initiated a project called Indigenous Tweets that encourages users to use their native language on social media every day. It tracks more than 150 different languages on Twitter—the number of users, the number of tweets, the top tweeter and the first tweeter.

Prof Scannell's newest endeavor is to help develop an Irish-language Siri or Alexa style virtual assistant. He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship by the US government and will spend the first half of 2020 in the Connemara Gaeltacht to work with researchers from NUI Galway’s Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge to research and develop computer resources.
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