Indigenous language technologies: Anti-colonial oases in a colonizing (digital) world

Language technologies are an increasingly common part of daily life for people around the world. Millions of users per day access services like Google Translate and Apple's Siri in a technology ecosystem that favours a handful of the world's most common languages. In a form of digital colonization, Indigenous languages are pushed aside in a profit-based system of research and development that results in both values conflicts and technological misalignments. Despite the hostile environment that disincentivizes the use of Indigenous languages, Indigenous language communities are pushing back by engaging language technologies to proactively support their work of language maintenance and revitalization. This paper argues that Indigenous leadership in the development of language technologies encourages the development of responsive and responsible Indigenous language technologies (ILT) that push back against dominant cultural and technical limitations.