New tool developed to help preserve the language of Blackfoot

Blackfoot was officially recognized as an endangered language by UNESCO and as of 2016, there were less than 5,000 speakers.

Yellowhorn speaks Blackfoot himself and is from the Piikani Nation. He noted there have been past attempts at preserving the language, “like making recordings or music and even writing”, but he said “those media don’t grow the number of Blackfoot speakers because, you know, Blackfoot people still esteem the oral tradition.”

“The oral tradition is what has been missing from other resources like writing and recordings, so we created this as a way to teach people to speak Blackfoot, as an aid to help language learning.”

Blackfoot is the mother tongue of three First Nations: Piikani (formerly Peigan), Siksika and Kainai. The Siksika and Kainai are located in southern Alberta, with the Piikani divided between the Blackfeet Nation in Montana (Southern Piikani) and the Piikani Nation in southern Alberta (Northern Piikani).

Yellowhorn noted another reason for creating the application is that the few Blackfoot speakers are older and are not always available to teach the language to younger individuals.

He said, “they might be able to help them an hour or two a week, but in between those visits, this language app helps people with pronunciation, the accent, but also hearing the words gets them accustomed to the sounds of Blackfoot.”

Yellowhorn told LNN that he grew up in the late 1950s and spoke the language because electricity had yet to come to his home community.

He noted that, “we got hooked up to the electrical grid around 1961 and then, people started buying radios and TVs and record players, and all of this was coming to them in English. There was no representation of Blackfoot.”

“So, we [the language] missed out on the broadcast media revolution and now we’re into this new revolution of computers and robots and I don’t want Blackfoot to miss out on this. I want to demonstrate that Blackfoot is a modern language and it is capable of interacting with the modern world on its own terms.”

More than 300 computer science students at SFU contributed to the project, to create web-based chatbots as part of their final assignment for their undergraduate computer science course CMPT 120-Intro to CS and Programming.

The project was funded by a federal government Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant.

Yellowhorn said the online resource is easy to use and hopes with going online, it can attract the attention of not just younger generations, but older individuals who cannot speak the language and anyone else who may not be Indigenous and wants to learn more about Blackfoot.

Eventually, the team plans to expand the tool so people can learn to say numbers and string together full sentences in Blackfoot. Another future step is to upload the program into a language robot that children can interact with, and a text-to-speech function is currently in development.

Additionally, once travel is safe again, Yellowhorn plans to meet with and record Blackfoot-speaking Elders in Alberta to include their voices in the project and expand the options of words and phrases.

by Justin Goulet

New tool developed to help preserve the language of Blackfoot

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