Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa

Published purpose

There are approximately 70 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, from 10 distinct language families. Many of these languages have fewer than 500 fluent speakers, most of them elderly. There is increasing interest among Indigenous communities in learning and speaking their ancestral languages. Teachers are often overwhelmed by the number of students, both in the classroom and online. Supporting these growing cohorts of students comes with challenges when there are few fluent first-language speakers. Teachers want to provide their students with opportunities to hear the language outside of class. While there is no replacement for a speaker of an Indigenous language, there are applications for speech synthesis (text-to-speech) to supplement text-based resources like verb grammars, dictionaries and phrasebooks. As part of a Small Teams Round 3 project, the DT-RC at National Research Council has partnered with three Indigenous educational institutions and the University of Edinburgh to develop state-of-the-art speech synthesis for Indigenous languages in Canada, with a focus on educational applications.