 We have the recording also that will be online later, so I hope to share this as well. So we just have to go many different channels. So I think I've talked enough and I will send more people here. And yeah, I will hand over now to Misako Ito, who will introduce the panelists. Misako works very long time with us here with UNESCO from Bangkok and will hand over to you. So thank you very much and a big round of applause for Misako and all the panelists. Thank you. Thank you, Mario, for hosting this panel on Indigenous languages, which is quite our original topic for forced Asia. And thank you also for joining this panel discussion despite that it's lunchtime break. But we will try to make it very interesting and because we are a small group, please feel free to intervene and ask questions and engage in the discussions because it's not a big audience. So just to give you some figures that UNESCO has, we have around 6,700 spoken languages today, but we estimate that half of them are endangered. And we have an estimate that every two weeks one language disappears. And when one language disappears, it goes with the culture, identity, or the perception of the world that is related to those languages, which disappear from the world and from the cultural diversity of the world. So this is a real concern from UNESCO, which is an inter-governmental organizations. We are championing in the area of cultural diversity and try to protect the world cultural diversity worldwide. And we also estimate that 90% of the world languages spoken today could not continue to exist until the end of 21st century. And most of them, the majority of those languages are indigenous languages. So the panel discussion here, and we have Eminent Speaker from both indigenous community, but also technology free and open source software, but also language expert. So the panel discussion here is to discuss how technology, and especially the free and open source software, can help to preserve those languages and also to revitalize some of them. So maybe I can just go through the speakers and you can introduce yourself by your name, your background very quickly. Thank you. Yes, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Samin Ngai, and I'm from Phu Nong, indigenous, and I'm working for Cambodia Indigenous Youth Association, and I'm from Cambodia. Good afternoon. My name is Orani Zariah Phut Ngam. I come from Thailand, and I work as a project coordinator at Foundation for Applied Linguistics. We provide an education program for the children in a remote area, which is Kormat Thang-based Modulingua Education. Good afternoon. This is Mathura Bikas Tripura from Bangladesh. My language is Kok Baro, my ethnicity is Tripura. We are working on the rights of indigenous peoples' languages since 2006. My organization's name is Jabbarang Kolanswamythi. It is led by the indigenous peoples. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Dawn Boutasingh. I'm from Laos. I'm working with the Cambodia Indigenous Focus on Youth and Elder in the remote area of Laos. Thank you. First, I was involved several times in projects involving the creation of technology for rendering complex scripting languages. Okay, thank you, David, and all. So maybe I can start with one question about the challenges that indigenous people are facing in this region and in the country. Who wants to pick up the questions first? Yes, Dawn, yeah, please. The challenge from my point of view in the Mekong region, the relocation of the indigenous from their homeland to different area. And because the development project often takes place in the area of where the indigenous people live. And for the indigenous in Laos, for example, with the project come to the area, then they have to relocate. Some is relocated by themselves, but some are forced relocated. So that is one challenge. And that affected to culture, language, and art lost in the community. And also about climate change. So here the climate change is also about food security and also society change. This is happened a lot in Laos. So for the language lost, I want to share with you about example when I was a child. So when I speak my own language in a majority society and we feel shy, I feel shy because the majority, they will laugh when I speak my own language and then they make fun of us. Yeah, and then we try, but we are small people, small ethnic group with the big groups of people. So it's like small water cannot stop fire. So we feel often like when we go to a market, like two people go together and then when we talk our own language, talk in our own language, people will just point at us like, ah, look at her, like make fun of us. And we feel like we are a crowd in a big society because my grandparents also have been relocated for three times because of the development project. So we have to move from one place to another place to join with a different ethnic group to become bigger village. So that is in one policy in our country, small village have to join small village to become a bigger village. And often the indigenous people will put, will put with the majority in Laos. And that's how we lost our language, our culture and the art. And many of us, we could not remember like the history of our people, the history of our ancestors, the footprint we could not find. So yeah. So you don't have any support from, apart from your close family and maybe community to continue to use the languages. You don't have any support from the government to continue to use that languages. So in Laos, every ethnic group allow people and we are not allowed to be indigenous. So Laos, we are not recognized as indigenous people. So we allow. And for us it's very difficult to preserve our own language and because we are not allowed to set up a learning center focused on indigenous language. So if we cannot do that and it will be difficult for us to like gathering with youth to learn their own language and the culture that we have. So the supporting now is like indigenous youth are together like Green Laos community where I work is we try to gather with many youth and we try to brainstorm what the language that you can remember, what our culture that you can recognize we do like that. And this is like the first start of our activity. But from government we don't have yet, like if we want to set up a learning center it will be very difficult and they're not allowed to do that. Thank you. Yes, I mean do you have also the similar challenges in Cambodia? I just would like to add from my friend from Laos. Actually if we look at the economic growth in the Mekong region there is many big investment project like mining, hydropower dam, economic land congestion. All this project is very have big impact to the indigenous community because most of project are come to the remote area, especially in the indigenous territory. If we look at the indigenous language challenges at the current situation, most of the young people they could not speak the indigenous language well, especially in Cambodia we have 24 indigenous people, indigenous groups and we have different languages and there are about 17 indigenous they can speak their language but the other they almost lost their language, they cannot speak their language. This is also the big concern. And for Siya, I mean Cambodia indigenous association working try to preserve or restore how we can make their language alive because it is a part of our identity which is recognized in the national and international laws and of course right now if we look at the elder, also elder not have time to talk about it or to teach or to gather the people to train how they can to maintain their identity and their language as well. Also like some youth when they study at school, for example in Cambodia from grade one to grade three, if the teacher who come to teach the student in the village they have to speak indigenous language 80 or 85% they have to speak in indigenous language and then when they start from grade four to grade six they have to speak Khmer language from 80 to 85% and then when indigenous students start grade seven we can secondary school or course they can speak full in Khmer and also they have to learn English. So it's very hard for them to catch up with the some session that provide by teacher. This is also one of the challenge. Also when they continue to study at the university most of the subject and most of the communication they have to speak in Khmer and also like in English. So this is the one thing that we lost our language, we lost our communication and this kind of the big concern. I think this time is good that UNESCO come up with this event and try to raise that concern. I hope the government and other partner who are working on indigenous area they have to very concerned and concentrate and try to work together how to preserve and maintain our identity and our language for the sustainable development in the country and also in the international, just one idea I think. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for contributing. So indigenous languages are written but according to your perspective why you think it's so important to protect those languages? They have a lot of people asking whether it would be better to focus on national languages to as a mean of communication, economic growth for the country. Why is it so important to protect the indigenous languages despite the localizations and a lot of challenges that indigenous people are facing? You want to, yes. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. First of all actually I have to mention one of the big challenges for the indigenous languages especially in the so called nation states the existence of indigenous peoples are not that much recognized. If I mention about my country's constitution according to the constitution only the Bangla the mainstream language is the official language in our country. No other languages are recognized by the constitution. Only in the recent amendment there is one clause included on the cultural promotion of the indigenous peoples. No other things like the rights of the indigenous peoples to on their land and other heritage things. So these are also very much a big challenge for the indigenous peoples to improve their this education system and many other things related to the language and culture. So there is also one thing like the policies. There are many policies in Bangladesh in some policies like the national education policy. In that policy indigenous languages somehow recognized but during the implementation there are some sort of dilemma and some sort of sort of the bureaucratic system which is somehow blocking the smooth implementation of these policies. So these are also very much important things. So if we want to overcome all these things actually we have to make the government fast motivated to really implement the rights of the indigenous peoples and their languages and cultures. So that is very much important. And we also need to strengthen the political commitments because of the SDGs and many other international mechanisms. The government they pretend to be very much positive to the rights of the indigenous peoples and other minority groups in the countries. But in the implementation level these are not actually that much effective. So in our country the government has started the education in indigenous languages since 2017. But still there are many other issues. They have developed the materials, education materials. It is distributed in the fields but the teachers are not teaching. The materials are not in used. So what is the use of these type of activities? So the teachers should be trained how to deliver the education system in their own languages. And also there are also some shortages of teachers in the fields that teachers are not allocated not posted to the same speaking languages, language areas. So if the teachers are not located in the same language speaking areas so the students are actually not getting education in their own languages. So it is also important. So another thing is like what I think is we have to show the government that they have benefits if they implement the right of indigenous peoples and their languages. Because if we want to achieve the SDGs, the SDG goals the government, if the government wants to do that they have to address the issues of indigenous peoples. Without addressing the issues of indigenous peoples it is not possible because the SDG itself says that no one shall leave behind. So that's the point actually. Yeah, thank you. So SDG is a sustainable development goals. I don't know if you heard about that. It's a set of 70 goals that were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly to pursue for the next until 2030. So, and there is a very big slogan that says no one left behind which is the key principle for the attainment of sustainable development goals. So you mentioned that languages is, you mentioned that indigenous right to languages is it something that is recognized internationally or is there any instrument that's our... Yes, we have many international instruments like UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. So that is a very strong instrument for the indigenous peoples to claim their rights. And there are also others like the ILO 107 about the rights of education in their own language up to primary level. And similarly, the SDG, the Sustainable Development Goals 4 itself saying that it is like an inclusive education. So if we want to make it inclusive, really inclusive, we have to include dangerous peoples. So maybe now we can move on on the questions about you saw how technology can really help to revitalize those languages and also create some resources to develop those languages. Orani, do you want to comment on that? Okay, maybe I will start with my opinions. What I work is about multilingual education and then we provide based on mother tongues and then we have a lot of teaching material like this is what we call a big book and then we have a picture story and we have a lot of things. And I think that nowadays indigenous people, even me, when I grow up, when I was in university, I'm not recognized, I'm not proud of myself. I mean, I'm not proud, I'm current. I mean, I belong to current indigenous and then I'm not proud of myself. And then when I, after that, when I'm finished university and then I'm joined in this program, I feel like this would be very nice to, we can learn both through this program. They can learn their own language and at the same time, after that they can bridge it to Thai, Thai, not Pasatai, national language and also it can be developed in another language. It would be very nice for them and also for us. I mean, how can we help indigenous people recognize about this, we have to show them what is the benefit. If we talk to you, you have to preserve your language, you have to speak your language, maybe a lot of indigenous people, they are not agree with us, but if we say like, you know, if you wanna be good in Pasatai, in Thai language, if you wanna be good in Pasah, English, you should start, I mean, start with your language and then it will be something linked to your, in another languages. What you ask, how? Technology, right? Technology can be like a big resource for us to collect those material things. I mean, all we can do like a teacher training, like e-learning things to train the teacher to help the children to learn their own language or we can do like a dictionary in our own language. We can do even to raise awareness. We can provide videos, saying what, a poster or whatever. Yes, this is what we do. So for example, for the current languages, do you have, I mean, do you have computer software that's in these languages? Do you have written script? Do you have a lot of resources online? Can we publish a website in these current languages or? Yes, in Thailand, we have 74 languages now. Current is the big group and then I'm not sure that is, I think maybe some of the application is related with our, in current, I think we already have it, but in another language, a small language, that is easy to appear, I think we don't have it yet. So maybe, I cannot tell exactly what application, but maybe, yeah. You mentioned that mother tongue based multilingual education, right? That people need to master the mother tongue, the current languages before starting to learn Thai, national languages or international languages, which is English. Do you think the lack of resources, the lack of technology in current languages could be a barrier for people to master fully these languages and to move on all the languages or the current state is good enough? I think it's good for indigenous languages because we can provide a place, I mean the place that they can reach to the information, they can reach to the resolve in our own language. Okay, David, you have been working for free and open source software, so you know the spirit of collaborations and how innovative ideas can be developed through collaborations. Do you think the forced community and free and open source software can help in this area? Where do you think are the areas of actions point? Of course, first of all, I think the role of technology, the role of technology has to be the role of facilitator, so for addressing many of the issues that you just raised, technology is, I mean in many ways, many things we do every day, technology has this role, so it's inevitable that that's also open source, play a role. And also because, you know, let's say, working on programming, we always used to hear this phrase that you know the programming, the language of programming is English because of many programming languages, some reference to some English words, but that's wrong in many ways, also for programming, but it's about the concept, what is behind the language. The language is something that it's there to express something, right? So that's the point. So if we're not able to express in our own language, that's what we are saying here, so it's a problem. So technology is a way to help the expression of people and this is why I think it's important to that the community, I mean, technology be more aware and that the community is also aware, community of open source, it's a big global community because we are not talking about a few people, and the technology companies took a few years to actually realize that this is a reality because when you talk about big companies, the objective is to of course make business and when you try to invest for making a business, you invest on the mass. So we develop products for the most people that can actually use or buy the services of the product and when it comes to minorities, that's of course a problem because you are not very keen to invest efforts and times and all the resources in developing something which is going to be used by a very few people, but actually that's also not true. I mean, the international here is an opportunity also to say that this indigenous community represent almost 400 million people around the world and this is totaling, I'm reading here, it is an amount of more than 2,600 languages that are considered to be indigenous. So of course within these languages, there are two languages that are used by very, very few people and this comes to the language in danger and there's been some processes, UNESCO has been, for example, approving some normative instrument that are trying to push the industry also to move towards the support of indigenous languages like the recommendation on the languages in cyberspace which was back in 2003, right? And this is one way where it's an attempt to sensitize and to try to move the decision makers towards supporting this kind of action. From the theory to the reality, of course it's a different story and then when it comes to technology, it is of course about standards, it's about open standards mainly, so we were already mentioning before maybe about the UNICODE, of course, which is a giant step into making it possible to support complex languages, but that's something that has to be sustained and UNICODE is a very heavy, long process and there again it's up to the community also to come up with solutions to propose, it's about making typefaces, fonts and so we have to be able to design open fonts, to be able to design open input tools because not languages are not, you cannot input things in the same way for all languages, so you need to have a different kind of inputs methods which may not exist and then it goes to the rendering of course of the language because it's no point in having something that you cannot then display or print and these are all the little things that actually are making it possible or impossible for people to use their own language in education, in everywhere, in news and also to tell the story about the language because some languages will disappear, history is full of things change, of course, but at the same time there is also a need for us as a humanity to tell the story of what was there or what is there today and you cannot do it without this kind of tools, so yes, open source community can actually work in many ways in supporting this effort and this is also one of the reasons of this hackathon today, I think it's really to sensitize the young developers or less young developers that actually this is not, this is a fight to be taken and that this is a very good example where open source spontaneous maker kind of impulse can really make a difference. Thank you, David. I think, yeah, you really mentioned a very important point that the international year of indigenous languages is an opportunity to remind us that the indigenous languages are not dead languages, they are the languages that are spoken by almost 400 million populations in the world and you know, they are not dead languages in the world and you know, more than 70, 80 countries. So it's very, very important for us to protect and maybe is there any comments or from the audience that you want to, or questions that you want to raise? Do you have any ideas of how you know, you as an active member of open source community can contribute in this area with AI or yes, all the technologies? Yes? Yeah, so my question is actually to, well, primarily to the representatives of people speaking minority languages because I was wondering if there is any, shall we say, resistance from within the communities themselves? And the reason why I'm asking is because, I mean, my language is not that small, it's not endangered, but I didn't even realize myself the importance of my language until I actually moved abroad and started using primarily English when I realized that only, if I were to only express myself in English, I would be very limited. There are many experiences I cannot express in English. Not because, you know, so I was wondering, but before I did that, and I have many friends, especially friends who work in technology that insists that, my language is Swedish by the way, so they insist that Swedish is not important in technology, all the documentation is available in English, all the information we need is on the English Wikipedia, we don't need the Swedish Wikipedia, which happened to be the number two Wikipedia in the world actually, but which is interesting, right? So you have very large, the language is used a lot and clearly a lot of people edit Wikipedia in my language, but still, especially within tech, it's completely dismissed by a lot of people. It, most of the technology people I work with wouldn't even hear about using, setting their leadership desktop to Swedish or reading the Swedish version of documentation, et cetera, et cetera, and this is within a language that is rather big. So I'm thinking within the small, the indigenous language, within the indigenous languages, there must be, I'm imagining that there's a lot of internal resistance, people saying, okay, fine, it's my language, but there are so few people speaking it and I need to speak Thai or whatever language to make myself understood. Why should we keep doing this? I can understand why people outside the community would discard the language, but I'm thinking that it probably happens within the communities themselves. So I'd like to have a comment on that, if possible. Yeah, who wants to? I want to share about the more indigenous allows. I think very important for us as indigenous to know our own language because we have rich history in the country, that's why we call ourselves our indigenous. So for us, because we are living in the community, because we are living in the country that our language still recognize and at the same time the language are disappearing because of other ethnic group or the majority. So for us to know our own language is very important because when we speak to our parents, we still use our language and we are shy to speak in different language with our parents, with our family. We feel shame because since we were born, our parents always keep talking and telling story about our footprint, the footprint of our ancestor and the culture that can color our ethnic group, we feel so proud because our culture, the language, so unique in the country, how to say it. And for us, if we don't have the language, if the culture disappear, we feel nothing. Like in Laos, for example, many ethnic group, especially the majority, they call ourselves, we are kumho, but they don't call us kumho. They call us Lao Kang. Lao Kang, it means you look down on us. Lao Kang, it means you are in the middle. You have no place to stay. You don't have your own culture. You don't know your own language. This is how we feel when they call us Lao Kang. And also many people will call us ka. Ka is like slave. But in the history where we hear from our parents, our history are so big. Our culture are so rich and we can feel that, we can touch that and we can listen that from our parents. So that is so beautiful. But when we hear it from different ethnic group, it's so different why they describe us that way. We also don't understand. And also if you want to do research on history of indigenous people, you have to submit a letter, a permission to do the research. And before you can public your research, you need to ask permission from the government. So before you submit, I mean, when you submit the research, the government will first scan all the information and they will allow you to publish which part of it. So here the culture and the history of our indigenous is still hidden and there are so many things that we should bring out. I think to preserve the language also back to that session. Once the language alive, the culture will come back and the history will present itself. That's what we believe. Thanks. Thank you, Dan. Yes, already. Okay. From educational aspect, if the children who are no more than one languages, they'll be more, much better in their learning. So if they start with the language that they are familiar with, the thing that they are very close to, maybe they can express what, you know, at the same time they can develop the idea they're thinking, so it is more, it's much better in multi-lingual. Yeah. It is really good that you expressed about that. Like today also myself, it's hard for me how I can express all the things that I concern in English. This is also the one thing in reality. Of course, I think in order to make sure that all the things related to the language is can still alive. It's not just only indigenous, our cell have to involve in protecting, but also the other people also have to be involved and also learning our language and also not just focus on their own. What is the problem right now? Everywhere they speak English. And sometimes we cannot express all things that we have in mind. So I think for my people in Cambodia, especially that we have 24 like I mentioned earlier, all of them, some like seven indigenous group, they are already lost because they're not encouraged from the government and also not like do the research and documentation about the issue of the language, the area that they use in their group and also in the policy, they still get also like no like well document and also like writing. Like in my language, the Phu Nong people, we have like writing in like Latin, but it is not recognized from government. And then the government, they work with UNESCO and other organization. They encourage us to use like Khmer writing. It hard for us to adapt to use that kind of a letter or writing. And also they try to collaborate or integrate in the technology. It easy for us to write. And some people not all they can use that kind of system. It still need more capacity building and awareness to the local people how it will be benefit for the new generation to use that kind of technology to bring their spirit, especially that they identity and their culture in term of education and anything that related to indigestion and development, something like that. Yeah, just. Yes. If I can also say something about, I mean we're speaking about language which are written also, but also oral languages that are not written and there's some feedback that we had from some indigenous communities that they don't want these languages to be written actually. So that's also another challenge. How can we provide tools for these languages to continue and to be expressible through the technology, through the internet, to the without being really written languages. So that's because the written form doesn't exist and unless the community really wants to do it, that's not up to us. I believe to decide for them. So how do you manage to bridge this huge gap? That's also something that could be addressed. I have just one example on the perception of indigenous peoples on their own languages. Actually it is issues of market value. You know, when we started in 2006, we have started the mother tongue based multi-lingual education activities in our areas with three major languages. That time actually some of the parents when we started working on this, they used to always they used to raise the question that whether our children will get job learning in their own languages. So that is very much important. So now actually they're realizing and also we are trying to make government understand about the issue. And recently the government is thinking to put sort of precondition for the teachers to be a teacher. They must have knowledge on their own languages. They must be able to read and write in their own languages. So after that actually now what we are seeing just last one, two years our indigenous youths they're starting to learn their own languages before they didn't know how to write and read their languages. So now they're starting and even some youths they're arranging the training how to read and write in their own languages putting their own money from on pockets. So this is a great I think progress of the indigenous peoples languages in Bangladesh. Yeah, so we are running out of time. So just to summarize the debate, I think for all of us one of the biggest challenges of indigenous languages is the fact that is the languages that is transmitted to the next generations only through the goodwill of those communities who continue to speak those languages. And there is no support from the system around. There is no support from educations, from media, from even the lack of written script. So this is I guess the biggest challenges. And so we have a hackathon that will start in one hour. But before moving to that would you be possible to say a final word about what would be your expectation out of this hackathon and this collaboration with the first community on this topic? Yes. Yes, for my expectation I hope this a voice today will be rich in the world and also like all indigenous people who still remain and practice their culture as they continue to speak their language. And also we need to call all the other people to be part of encourage and work together to maintain our indigenous language in the world. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. For me my expectation for this is will be like it would be nice if hackathon can help my work with the colleague can do like learning things or what education games or application that help my teacher. I mean because we work with teacher and then it would be nice if we do like, I'm not sure that we can call like a community, a club or something like that. And then they can talk to each other, they can share what the ideas or encourage each other by using the language that they are familiar with. It would be nice and we also in Thailand, not now, nowadays, we are not, I mean government is not take this program to apply it or the country yet, but many school, government school are interested in this and then it would be nice for us if we have like a learning things, I think maybe like this and it would be because we can express to, we can share with them more easy and then they can approach it, yeah. Okay, my expectation from this hackathon is actually most of the indigenous peoples in our country, in our region specifically, they live in remote areas. So sometimes they don't have a smooth internet connections. So I'd be very much grateful to know from our participants and all the experts from this hackathon how we can help the indigenous peoples to make their languages available through online and offline both of the ways, yeah. So for me, very similar, we are living in the very remote area so we could not access to internet, very difficult. And for me, I'm looking for an opportunity in this hackathon program to see how can I adjust the app or application that I can use some information that we have in our community. For example, in Greenhouse Community Volunteer Group, we are working on making short film and also documentary. And we want to, you know, like after we film, we document this and how can we apply in mobile app and how can this can spread the world, you know, to make our indigenous to be proud and learn about the culture through that kind of app. And sometimes we can bring like internet, like wireless, we can bring that to community and we can show them. So this we call mobile, mobile show, something like that, yeah. So I myself also a film director and I have been direct film already and also in the language. And I was so proud that I can, that I had opportunity to show it in my community and they are so like, I look so bright and big. They cannot imagine that we can do this and they laugh a lot and I think that will be something that I can apply also in my community and other community, yeah. And also one thing, the language, we also have it that our community, ancestor or elder, we create our own alphabet and we also looking for network here who can also help us to see if this is something that we should keep it, you know, like record it for our indigenous, yeah. Thank you. What can I say more? I think, I hope that maybe what comes out, it's really maybe the beginning of something that it's going to be kept in mind by not only the participant to the Akaton, but also the entire Foss Asia community and maybe that some of the innovations that are even showcased downstairs in the exhibition could be, you know, re-tweaked and re-thought for indigenous languages and for indigenous communities. One other example, I think we were, Izako was discussing this morning, was how to use maybe AI, open source AI solutions that are maybe able to work even offline and they could really be helpful in producing tools that are, you know, helping indigenous languages to be accessible, also to live, so, yeah. These are the very nice innovation to explore here. So thank you very much for listening to us and thank you very much for the speakers and so we see you again in our here for the Akaton. Thank you.