Free App Helps Revive Ojibwe Language for New Generation

A new free app is helping breathe life into an endangered Indigenous language, giving younger generations a modern way to connect with their heritage.

The Indigenous Collections app was created by Motorola and the Lenovo Foundation in partnership with the Rainy Lake Ojibwe community. It's designed to make the Ojibwe language accessible through the stories and cultural knowledge of its speakers.

About 50,000 people still speak Ojibwe today, primarily in Indigenous communities across southern Canada and the northern United States. Most of these speakers are over 70 years old, which puts the language at serious risk of disappearing without younger people learning it.

Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Minnesota's Bemidji State University, worked with language teacher Jason Jones and community elders to build the app. Rather than functioning as a simple translation dictionary, it serves as a hub of cultural knowledge rooted in Ojibwe vocabulary.

Users can explore oral histories, browse translated narratives, build family trees, and discover information about culturally significant landmarks in their area. The app centers on storytelling, which Treuer says remains one of the most effective ways to transmit language and cultural knowledge between generations.

The project is part of Motorola's Indigenous Languages Initiative, which launched to support UNESCO's International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Before European colonization, experts estimate more than 300 distinct languages were spoken north of what is now Mexico.

From the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s, many Indigenous children in the United States were forced into boarding schools designed to suppress their native languages and cultures. Today, many of those languages teeter on the edge of extinction.

The Ripple Effect

The app represents a growing movement to use technology as a force for cultural preservation. In 2022, Motorola worked with Cherokee leaders to incorporate the Cherokee language as an option on smartphone interfaces, choosing words and phrases that reflected how elders actually speak.

Benjamin Frey, a language scholar and member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who worked on that project, acknowledges some community members remain wary of tech companies working with Indigenous knowledge. But he sees the potential benefit as worth the risk at a time when these languages could easily slip out of practice.

As Treuer writes in his book The Language Warrior's Manifesto, "We cannot wish our languages back to health. We cannot teach them if we don't first learn them."

This app puts that teaching power directly into the hands of anyone with a smartphone.