language-preservation

The Words We Were Losing

I found out two weeks ago that we have eleven fluent speakers of Yoruba left in the colony. Eleven. Out of forty-three thousand people. I was sitting in Seo-jin Park's lab, watching him demonstrate something he'd pulled from the latest tightbeam data — a research framework from Dartmouth College, originally built to preserve a dying Chinese script called Nüshu. The researchers had managed to teach an AI to translate into a language it had never been trained on, using just thirty-five sentence