For indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon, getting online is a challenge. Now, a smartphone app makes it easy to connect, allowing them to use their own native languages.
Hyper-connected Brazil has more cell phones than people — more than 250 million, for a population of 203 million, according to communications consultancy Teleco.
But even when they have smartphones and internet connections, the vast country’s 1.7 million indigenous people have often been shut out of the connectivity revolution, as the devices typically have keyboards in Brazilian Portuguese rather than indigenous languages.
“Linklado”, an app developed by two young friends from the Amazon region, offers a solution: It’s a digital keyboard that allows indigenous communities to write with a combination of Latin letters, bars, swoops, tones and other signs used in many alphabets indigenous to Brazil.
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Launched in 2022, it helps indigenous users communicate with each other and the world, whether from remote villages deep in the Amazon or from cities and towns scattered across the region.
“Linklado has done so much good for the indigenous people, including me,” says Cristina Quirino Mariano, 30, a member of the Ticuna people.
“Before, we couldn’t write on our phones. Now we can,” he told AFP, speaking in Portuguese, Brazil’s official language.
The original inhabitants of the land now known as Brazil had oral traditions before Portuguese colonists arrived in the 16th century.
When Europeans began writing these languages, they indicated the different sounds by adapting the Latin alphabet with symbols known as “dialects.”
But those alphabets weren’t available on mobile phones — until now.
The situation “left natives sending audio messages on their phones because they couldn’t write exactly what they wanted to say,” says Linklado project coordinator Noemia Ishikawa.
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The 51-year-old biologist struggled to translate her own research.
“I spent 14 years complaining that we needed a keyboard to fix this problem,” he says.
Four day challenge
Today, “the app works for every indigenous language in the Amazon,” about 40 in total, says Juliano Portela, who developed it with a friend, Samuel Benzecry, when he was just 17 years old.
Both natives of the Amazon region of northern Brazil, the couple are now studying in the United States.
Benzecry, who knew about the difficulties some of their native neighbors were having writing on their phones, recruited Portela, a programming maverick, to come up with a solution.
“At first, I was going to make a physical keyboard. But then I realized it wouldn’t be practical because some natives don’t have computers,” Portela told AFP.
“It took us four days to build the app. We had no idea it would be this fast.”
They started testing their creation in May 2022 and then released the official version in August.
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It has since been downloaded more than 3,000 times.
But the number of users is more.
“A lot of indigenous people are still using the trial version that we sent on WhatsApp, which people forwarded to each other,” says Portela.
Get paid to translate
Linklado is free.
However, it does offer an option for non-speakers to pay to have texts translated into native languages.
The income-generating project helps indigenous women — who are often left out of Latin America’s largest economy — earn an income by knowing local languages.
Rosilda Cordeiro da Silva, a 61-year-old indigenous language teacher, is part of the app’s team of translators.
“It was very positive for me,” he says.
Having the digital keyboard, she adds, “made me more confident when translating.”
The app also helps in the effort to save indigenous languages ββthat are at risk of extinction.
Vanda Witoto, a 35-year-old indigenous activist, hopes it will help “save the Bure language, which the Witoto people speak.”
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“This keyboard means we don’t have to use characters that don’t belong in our language,” he says.
Beyond the Amazon, saving endangered languages ββis a global challenge.
According to a 2018 United Nations report, nearly half of the world’s languages ββ– mostly indigenous languages ββ– are at risk of extinction by the end of this century.
Source: AFP