High-Tech Toys Turn into Language-Learning Tools

Hand-held video games, iPhones and iPods are the top toys of today’s kids, and they spend hours and hours every day on them. But, just as one Native American-owned company has figured out, these interactive gizmos can also be great language-learning tools.

This summer, Banning, Calif.-based Thornton Media introduced its Language Pal, software that can program an indigenous language onto Nintendo DSi hand-held consoles and the first ever Native American language iPhone/iPod app.

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Native American Languages Preserved with Technology

Indian tribes have really embraced technology, but when it comes to solutions and tools that can help them save their languages, their arms could not be open any wider.

As the Indigenous Language Institute sees it, there is a definite symbiosis from old knowledge and new tools. To show tribes just how harmonious this relationship can be, ILI launched, in collaboration with the University of Washington, a workshop series in 2001 called Ancient Voices, Modern Tools: Native Languages and Technology.

More than 300 Native American languages have already been lost, according to Santa Fe, N.M.-based ILA, and more than 75 of those languages went extinct over the last century.

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A Digital Story created by Deborah S. Bia. The story is about the history of Canyon De Chelly. It is told in the Navajo Language.