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Paper abstract:

One type of challenge faced by speakers of minoritised and endangered languages in language maintenance and revitalisation efforts is the lack of support for the language on digital platforms. This paper overviews a range of major impediments of this type, and discusses what approaches are available to overcome them, with examples drawn primarily from languages of Central Eurasia. Challenges range from having the language recognised with an ISO 639 code to developing personal voice assistants in the language, and everything in between (localisation, input methods, spell checking, machine translation). Such tools are important because they add to the ease with which a language can be used in digital contexts, which has the potential to increase both the range of uses and the perceptions of the language, both of which are crucial for maintenance and revitalisation. Corpus-based approaches, which leverage existing corpora, and symbolic approaches, whose use is a form of linguistic documentation—as well as hybrid approaches—offer various advantages and disadvantages for implementing these kinds of language technology, but the major impediments lie elsewhere. The position of each modern Turkic language in relation to the availability of and barriers to language technology is surveyed, to identify priorities for future language technology work.