The archiving of dying Indigenous languages is helping pull them back from extinction, thanks to locally developed generative AI (genAI) models that have enabled the creation of the first-ever science app in Western Australia’s Ngalia language which is spoken by just three people.

That app – called Mamutjitji Story and produced by WA-based Kiwa Digital – has been designed to not only teach children science and creation stories, but to do so in an indigenous language that is intimately linked to the culture that produced those stories.

Built using Kiwa Digital’s CultureQ platform, the app, which features the antlions plentiful in the WA desert, leverages thousands of years’ worth of Ngalia cultural artefacts including oral histories of elders, historical land claims, creation stories, music, artworks, and lexicon.

Working with the Ngalia Western Desert Aboriginal People, Kiwa has adapted CultureQ, which is built on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock-based genAI platform called Caitlyn, from partner Custom D, to identify data patterns that help it contextualise content.

GenAI helps CultureQ not only process the content of the artefacts – and the particulars of the Ngalia language – but enables the generation of new content, such as children’s ebooks and large-scale data resources, based on its ever-expanding semantic understanding.

Because it is based on primary cultural artefacts, CultureQ empowers Indigenous groups to share their history while maintaining what Kiwa Digital CEO Steven Renata called ‘narrative sovereignty’ – the ability to tell their story without the filters of translation or repurposing.

“You get to know a lot about languages and the complexities of going from one language to another,” Renata told Information Age, noting that “even when these stories are retold in English, unintentional errors can occur.”

“Our experience has been that these groups like these stories to be told without being changed, so it’s the real story and not a version told from another culture’s perspective.”

Kado Muir is one of only three people to speak the Ngalia language. Photo: Supplied

CultureQ’s ability to detect sacred cultural content helps secure cultural legacies for the long-term, Renata said, with the genAI tapping media localisation experience that also saw Kiwa recently create a Cherokee language version of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

“As you bring these [languages] into the modern context,” Renata said, “using technology as a tool can help maintain its accuracy and accessibility; you get the best of both worlds.”

Preserving a language, not just its echoes

GenAI’s ability to analyse the relationships between words and sounds, and then this understanding to generate seemingly authentic new voice and other content, is a game-changer for cultural preservation efforts previously based on passively cataloguing artefacts.

The technology “enhances our ability to discharge our cultural obligations,” said Kado Muir, one of only three people who still speak the Ngalia language, who sees it as the next step after recently working with his mother to develop a dictionary of the language.

Around 7,000 languages have been identified worldwide – but half are considered endangered and 1,500 are expected to disappear by the end of the century, according to the World Economic Forum – with Ngalia among those in its last days unless it can be preserved.

ANU researchers found that endangered languages tend to fade into the background because classroom instruction is dominated by languages like English, leading them to warn that “urgent investment is needed in language documentation” and preservation programs.

Using personalised AI, he adds, “you can ask questions about the data you have – so if I put in an image of a grandmother from the 1900s, say, I could ask the AI facts about her; if it’s ingested into documents, it will pull from these different sources, but in a private way.”

Yet with most cultural heritage programs focused on cataloguing dying languages and cultural artefacts rather than repurposing them for new uses – essential for teaching dying languages to new generations – genAI promises more durable outcomes.

“Kado and his family have this incredible dreamtime narrative that is thousands of years old,” Renata said, adding that through genAI’s text-to-speech, voice generation, translation and live chat, “Kado and his family are going to tell that story in Ngalia in its original form.”