{"id":4908,"date":"2020-11-23T00:09:09","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T05:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.indianz.com\/News\/?p=4908"},"modified":"2020-11-23T00:19:07","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T05:19:07","slug":"montana-free-press-crow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indianz.com\/News\/2020\/11\/23\/montana-free-press-crow\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Free Press: Technology helps keep Crow language alive"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Crow Language Consortium: Launch of Crow Dictionary App<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n
Bringing a language back to life<\/div>\r\n
A new dictionary app, four years in the making, aims to spark a Crow comeback<\/div>\r\n
Monday, November 23, 2020<\/div>\r\n
By Chris Aadland<\/div>\r\n
Montana Free Press<\/DIV>\r\n
montanafreepress.org<\/A><\/DIV>\r\n

<\/p>\r\nWith fewer and fewer fluent speakers of the Crow language, advocates for revitalizing it hope a free online dictionary can aid people already working to bolster their skills and make learning the language more accessible.\u00a0

<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\nOn Thursday, a group of linguists, native Crow speakers and programmers \r\nlaunched the app<\/a>\r\nafter four years of work on the project. The dictionary contains more than 10,000 entries and audio of Crow language speakers demonstrating pronunciation. It is free to \r\ndownload on Android and IOS devices<\/a>. The group that spearheaded the project \u2014 a coalition of the nonprofit \r\nLanguage Conservancy<\/a>, the Crow Nation, Little Big Horn College and the \r\nCrow Language Consortium<\/a>\r\n\u2014 celebrated the app\u2019s launch during a virtual event that included a demonstration and remarks from participants in the project.\u00a0\r\n

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Screenshots from the Apple iPadOS version of the Crow Mobile Dictionary app<\/figcaption>\r\n

<\/P>\r\nThe hope, said Crow Language Consortium Board Chair and Project Director Janine Pease, is that the dictionary app will be useful for people currently trying to learn the language, inspire learners who don\u2019t have access to a fluent teacher, and meet younger generations where they already spend a lot of their time.\u00a0\u00a0

<\/P>\r\n\r\n\u201cTechnology is really accessible to our youngsters,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat really is important, is it can step into the grand scheme of media and technology but have the quality that delivers the language.\u201d

<\/P>\r\n\r\nIn the past, Pease said, she was hesitant about using technology to teach the language, preferring one-on-one methods to \u201crekindle the way language was learned for generations upon generations.\u201d

<\/P>\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause of where we are in history and time, we need to take advantage of each and every tool we have,\u201d she said.\u00a0

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<\/p>\r\nThere are other dictionaries of the Crow language, also known as Apsaalooke, but in many cases they aren\u2019t as accessible as the online app, either out of print and hard to find or too expensive for many language learners. The new app\u2019s launch comes as Crow \r\nfluency rates have dropped<\/a>\r\nfrom 85% in the 1960s to 20% today. \r\nFluent Crow speakers currently number about 4,200<\/a>, while some tribes have only a handful of fluent speakers remaining, Pease said.\u00a0\r\n

<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\nWorldwide, about 90% of the approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken are expected to become extinct in the next 100 years, according to the Language Conservancy. In the last 400 years, more than 200 Indigenous languages in the United States have gone extinct, \r\naccording to the nonprofit<\/a>, which works to help endangered languages endure.\r\n

<\/P>\r\n\r\nFor years, U.S. government policies discouraged Indigenous people from speaking their native languages and sometimes forced attendance at boarding schools where speaking an Indigenous language was forbidden, said Language Conservancy President Wil Meya. The movement to revitalize Indigenous languages is often driven by younger generations eager to connect with their culture in a way their grandparents and great-grandparents did.\u00a0

<\/P>\r\n\r\n\u201cLanguage is the vehicle of culture,\u201d Meya said. \u201cThe impacts of colonial policies over the last 200 years \u2026 have resulted in the situation we\u2019re in today.\u201d

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