The "Empty Canvas" Initiative: Supporting and Saving Endangered and Severely Underrepresented Languages on LingQ

Open Forum
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This thread is inspired by the important discussion started by @Hitchy149 in his post “Please add Inuktitut and/or Cree”. Hitchy149’s passionate call for LingQ to provide more support for languages with very few speakers and materials resonated deeply with me, and I wanted to expand on his crucial points. Thank you, Hitchy149, for bringing this vital issue to the forefront.

It’s worth remembering that this very goal – supporting speakers of minor languages, especially where resources are scarce – has been a long-term vision for LingQ. As @steve himself stated back in August 2008: “One of our long term goals here is to help speakers of minor languages, especially where text books are not available, to maintain these languages and help others to learn them.” This initiative to create “empty canvases” directly serves that original and vital purpose.

The survival of languages with very few speakers and limited resources hangs in the balance, and the support they receive now is absolutely critical. We have a responsibility to treat these languages with the utmost respect and urgently build the teaching tools and materials needed to prevent their extinction – a fate they currently face due to the lack of these very resources.

Hitchy149’s offer to begin collecting teaching material on LingQ is incredibly valuable, and his passion deserves our full support. To truly make a difference, he needs access – that “empty canvas” he envisions. This simple step could have a profound long-term impact, offering a lifeline to languages on the brink.

I wholeheartedly agree with the call to “go wild” and create these initial spaces for other indigenous languages worldwide. More specifically, when dedicated individuals step forward, willing to champion and maintain such a space, LingQ should empower them with the necessary tools and encouragement. This is about giving dying languages a fighting chance.

@mark @steve, I believe LingQ has a unique opportunity to become a true leader in language preservation. By re-evaluating the current policies for severely underrepresented languages, you can unlock incredible potential. The initial requirements of Mini Stories and Grammar Guides can be an insurmountable barrier for these tiny language communities. What’s needed is a dedicated space where content can begin to grow organically, attracting passionate individuals to build the community and the resources.

Consider Inuktitut, the language of Canada’s north! The fact that someone is offering to start building content for it is a fantastic opportunity that deserves enthusiastic support from LingQ. Create the space, and I believe a dedicated community will emerge.

Perhaps a system of conditional visibility could ensure quality and activity: these languages remain visible as long as there is consistent, high-quality contribution and usage, otherwise being temporarily hidden until renewed activity occurs. This could incentivize community growth and language vitality on LingQ.

For example, I would be thrilled to see such a starting space created for Cook Islands Māori. If this were possible, I would rally people to contribute, and I would contribute myself, with the eventual goal of meeting the requirements for a more prominent category like “Beta.”

The fact that tools like Google Translate and Whisper AI already support Inuktitut makes content creation significantly easier. Sadly, this isn’t the case for Cook Islands Māori or Cree. (I also hope to see New Zealand Māori and Hawaiian, which do have this support, embraced on LingQ by removing unnecessary initial barriers for enthusiastic content creators.)

LingQ has the potential to be the central platform for learning and promoting all languages. By streamlining the initial requirements for these most vulnerable languages, LingQ can unlock this potential and, ultimately, foster growth and engagement across the board. As Hitchy149 said, “If we wait, then it’s too late. It just needs the empty canvas NOW.”

This approach would also benefit languages like Toki Pona.

@mark and @steve: I sincerely hope you will consider this proposal and take action to support these vital languages.

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Thank you so much @ScottTyler. I will be here to do my part!

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Thanks for bringing this to our attention. As I said on that other thread:
We would love to add some indigenous languages as you suggest but it isn’t as easy as adding some kind of blank slot. Our commitment is to try to add languages for which Mini Stories and our other requirements have been fulfilled. This should be possible for those languages as well and the requirements are not that onerous. It will take effort from volunteers like yourself though. There may be organizations out there already working on these languages, I’m sure there is government money spent there. If you can enlist their help in fulfilling our content requirements, that may be your best bet.

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I will still gather up resources and make connections to learn/help spread Inuktitut, I was already. I love the lingq system, and one day I will try to submit resources I find to Lingq. I hope to work together in the future😁 If i do submit resources for other languages, how would I do it?

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@Mark;

Our commitment is to try to add languages for which Mini Stories and our other requirements have been fulfilled.

That is exactly the point. What is the purpose of Mini Stories in these particular cases? If you are interested in non-mainstream languages, you probably already have enough experience with language learning to be able to search for content on your own. Mini stories are not necessary for this.

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A few comments here.

  1. I think the reason LingQ makes the requirement of having the mini-stories is just to have some standard of available material for each new language so new users don’t feel cheated in paying for LingQ but not finding much material in the language they prioritized here. If volunteers can’t get together to create the mini-stories, it does not seem extremely likely they’ll still be able to get much other useful material into LingQ.

I’m not a LingQ emplotyee though, so I’ll let actual LingQ staff answer that comment.

  1. I tried reaching out to a language institute in West-Greenland in order to get Greenlandic added to LingQ. They said they did not have the time/resources to do it and they pointed out another interesting thing: The Greenlandic languages are polysynthetic languages which means the known words / new words / LingQ counts would be totally meaningless and completely bloated. You’d pretty much keep getting mostly blue words no matter how long you studied them. The same would thus also be true of Inuktitut. This does not mean it would be useless to have material in LingQ in these languages, but it wouldn’t work as well as with most other languages. The AI-generated / Google generated translations would also have to be really good because user-generated translations would just get lost in an endless ocean of different words that are more like sentences or semi-sentences.
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You can find the Contributor tab on the web app and submit your request there when you are ready to contribute.

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If you’re just looking to study a language for yourself, it’s already possible to use a slot for a language you have no intention of studying to learn the one you actually want.

However, if the goal is to increase the number of learners of a certain language, then it makes sense to first focus on developing at least the most basic learning materials.

That said, this isn’t an issue limited to minority languages, there’s only so much that can be done by relying on volunteers to create content. If a system could be put in place that offers proper incentives to content creators, I believe it could become a platform where people continuously produce learning materials.

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Which, if the language uses the same alphabet, is a bad idea. If there are words written the same as in your target language, you will create false translations for those who actually want to learn that language whose slot you butcher. There is already the problem that users tend to not restrict themselves to one language when writing definitions, not to mention that there isn’t any standard for those user definitions anyways.

If it is okay to misuse other language slots I don’t see why LingQ couldn’t just provide the possibility for users to create empty canvases, as the OP called it. Why not make them private so that only the respective user can see it? No harm done, no quality control needed.

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Actually, I completely agree with you. This kind of usage is clearly not what the developers intended, and it could potentially cause unexpected issues. That’s why I personally wouldn’t even consider doing it.

However, I did come across someone in another part of this community who was advocating for such usage. I remember frowning when I saw that.

That said, I was also puzzled by the fact that the administrators remain stubbornly unwilling to provide a feature for creating empty language slots.

So, my earlier comment was, in a way, meant to be somewhat sarcastic.