Endangered Voices
A language dies every two weeks, taking with it centuries of history, culture, and knowledge.
The Endangered Voices app makes learning endangered languages accessible and fun, while helping preserve rich cultural perspectives and building connections within our communities.
Endangered Voices teaches a range of endangered languages spoken using multiple learning modes to support diverse learning styles. With dynamic gamified quizzes, innovative AI-powered conversations, and a community-focused learning mode, the app offers a rich, engaging experience. Learn vocabulary, practice speaking in real conversations, and connect with local and global communities.
Languages are at the heart of community, identity, and culture.The Endangered Voices app helps preserve not just languages, but a way of seeing the world. The app goes beyond mere language acquisition. It is designed to be a bridge, not just to the past but to the future, helping foster connection and community across generations and cultures.
The Challenge
Half of the world's languages are at risk of disappearing by the end of the century, threatened by assimilation, dominance of common languages, and declining language transmission. These languages are considered endangered, defined as ranging from vulnerable to critically at risk by UNESCO.
Stemming the tide of language loss aligns with UN sustainability goals by promoting inclusive societies, sustainable communities, well-being, and life-long learning opportunities for all.
The loss of endangered languages has significant consequences, representing an erosion of culture, community, and knowledge. The decline of languages can be culturally devastating, cutting off communities from their histories and disrupting intergenerational bonds. Language loss also exacerbates marginalization and social inequities. Languages often embody traditional knowledge about the environment, including medicinal practices, agricultural techniques, and ecological systems, that disappears with language loss.
Traditional educational resources rarely, if ever, teach endangered languages. Finding local classes that teach endangered languages is challenging, and they often pose financial and accessibility challenges for learners. The Endangered Voices app fills this gap.
What it does
Endangered Voices features six endangered languages—Nahuatl, Leni-Lenape, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Mandinka, Beri/Zaghawa, and Quechua — still spoken in the US today. Gamified quizzes make vocabulary learning fun and engaging, using methods proven to boost motivation. Each language’s main screen introduces users to its cultural background and linguistic richness, offering vocabulary topics from greetings to culture. Users can explore definitions and practice through gamified questions. In this quiz game learning mode, users win points for correctly defining words, gaining a bolt of success.
What truly sets the app apart is its ability to grow with learners, moving beyond quiz-based learning to provide a unique conversational learning mode. Harnessing the OpenAI API, this conversational chat mode adapts to their progress, replacing English with learned vocabulary for immersive practice, building confidence and fluency.
Lastly, the app fosters connection through its community features. From local resources and volunteering opportunities to the vibrant Endangered Voices Discord, users can engage with speakers and fellow learners worldwide, creating meaningful connections while preserving these languages.
Design and Methods
The Endangered Voices mobile app was designed and prototyped using the Thunkable integrated development environment, which supports dual iOS and Android development and user interface (UI) libraries. The UI was designed to provide a rich, varied graphical experience for enhanced engagement. The app is implemented primarily in Java and JSON.
The app was designed to have three learning modes: a gamified quiz learning mode, an AI-powered conversational practice mode, and a community learning mode. For each language, vocabularies were categorized by topic area and stored in a cloud-based database integrated through the Google API. The OpenAI API was combined with prompt engineering to produce the conversational chatbot that incorporates the endangered-language words which the user has learned in the quiz mode, directing conversation towards topics that use these words. After these modes were implemented for one endangered language, additional languages were added through a language variable designed to provide an index into the vocabulary database.
Challenges overcome
From integrating a robust vocabulary database to engineering seamless AI-driven conversations, building Endangered Voices required creative problem-solving.
Building the app presented several technical challenges, starting with the gamified quiz learning mode. Initially, the lack of a database-based approach made creating quiz questions inefficient. Transitioning to a cloud-based vocabulary database integrated with the Google API streamlined data retrieval, while randomized word selection further optimized question generation. To enhance the user experience, it was necessary to develop methods to track progress. This allows experience points to be awarded and user-mastered vocabulary to be channeled into the conversational chat learning mode. For users who prefer not to log in, on-device storage was implemented to securely save progress.
A second challenge was optimizing the conversational chatbot to provide a second, more natural learning method. After integrating the chat feature using the OpenAI API, the app still had to implement a conversational style that incorporated the endangered language using prompt engineering. Iterative design and experimentation was essential to simulating realistic dialogue. Further, methods had to be developed for transferring the words the user had successfully practiced to the chat feature for conversation, reinforcing learning and making practice seamless and effective.
What's next
The journey doesn’t stop here. Endangered Voices has the potential to be a central hub for learning at-risk languages. Future updates will include audio features to enhance spoken language learning. Audio clips will be included in the vocabulary and quiz-based learning screens to help users with pronunciation. Ultimately, spoken conversation could be incorporated into the AI chat-based learning mode.
The app will also expand its language offerings and the scope of existing languages. It will deepen learning for each language by including more vocabulary units and advanced grammatical concepts. The AI conversational learning mode would be extended to further incorporate the language’s linguistic structure as learners progress.
Vision for the Future
Every word we learn in an endangered language is a step toward preserving not just a language, but a way of seeing the world. Endangered Voices is a bridge, not just to the past but to the future — ensuring that endangered languages don’t simply disappear but continue to build connection and well-being.
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