Yanne Cby Yanne C
語言:
English /// 中文
Translator: Brian Hioe
Photo courtesy of Omah Canglah
The following interview was originally posted on Global Voices ahead of the panel, “Digital Initiatives for Indigenous Languages of Taiwan,” which was held on June 28, 2025 at DAYBREAK. This event is the first time Rising Voices, in collaboration with New Bloom and the Indigenous Youth Front, organized an event in Taiwan to bring together local Indigenous language digital activists to learn from and connect with each other. The idea was to facilitate the exchange of learned experiences and innovative ideas among these language activists, inspiring more possibilities for their language work.
In this interview, Omah Canglah, an Amis speaker on the panel from Hualien, Taiwan, shares about their language activism work and app development.
Rising Voices (RV): Please tell us about yourself and your language-related work
Omah Canglah (OC): Nga’ay ho, ci Omah kako (Hello everybody, I am Omah). I’m from the Amis Tribe of Tokar in Yuli, Hualien. I’m currently working as a product manager at ÌTHUÂN KHOKI, focused on developing Amis and Taiwanese Hokkien language practice apps. At the same time, I’m a board member of the Taiwan Amis Sustainable Development Association.
This is my ninth year as a board member. I started as a youth board member, but now I’m not sure if I can still be counted as a young person. In 2019, I joined a project by the Amis language promotion working group. Through the course of three years, while acting as a board member and project staff, I worked with team members on a variety of language promotion activities of all sizes, ranging from online language learning meetups for youth, Amis literature awards, to language training summer camps. Looking back, it seems like I’ve never done anything outside of Indigenous language-related work!
RV: What is the current state of the Indigenous language(s) you are working with, online and offline?
OC: From 2019 to 2022, the Amis language working group traveled to 210 Amis communities around Taiwan to conduct an ‘Amis Language Use Map.’ We discovered that the average age of those who can speak fluently in Amis is above 50. There are very few under 50 who can speak the language fluently. Even as the Amis are the largest Indigenous group in Taiwan, the rate of language loss is alarming.
Currently, most Amis language content on the internet is presented in the form of Amis language learning materials, consisting mainly of that for the language certification exam, such as Klokah.tw. Outside of this, there are also some internet communities that focus on language learning, such as Amisitokay and Sowal no Pangcah. In the past few years, some Amis creative works have stood out, such as the Amis song ‘Malemeday’ by Madal, which can be listened to on major music platforms.
RV: What are your motivations for seeing these language(s) present in digital spaces?
OC: In my past work experience, I came to understand that young people are often unwilling to learn Indigenous languages. Some believe that Indigenous languages are the language of ‘old people,’ that it can’t be used in the future. And many language materials focus primarily on agriculture, nature, and similar topics. This further leads to the stereotype of Indigenous languages as ‘not modern, not practical, and old,’ further reducing their willingness to learn.
But because of this, I hope that through digital initiatives, in linking technology and language learning, this can change the image of Indigenous language learning to break these stereotypes.
I believe that by promoting the exposure of Indigenous languages across social media and digital products, it’ll help young people see that ‘Indigenous languages can be modern, too!’, hence increasing their willingness to learn and raising their awareness for these languages.
RV: Could you share some of the challenges encountered and lessons learned in your digital work with these languages?
OC: With the rapid development of technology, Indigenous languages face a severe challenge when it comes to vocabulary. Many new words and expressions related to technology are hard to be translated directly, which requires making up of new words or the use of loanwords. To establish a new word also proves challenging when it comes to elderly language instructors who may not be so familiar with these technologies.
Outside of this, a challenge I encountered in developing language apps for reading/speaking practice was that, in identifying pronunciations, there is a need for a large quantity of audio files for training high-quality identification models. Ideally, the audio should match the age of the target users.
Our target users are between 18 and 40. But because the average age of those who use Indigenous languages is older, it is extremely hard to find enough people of the target age groups to record the audio for us. This makes me worry all the more about the current situation of language loss.
RV: What concrete steps do you think can be taken to encourage younger people to use Indigenous languages in the digital space?
OC: Increasing the exposure of Indigenous languages in social media environments should be the easiest way to promote the willingness of young people to learn Indigenous languages. Through social media language contests, memes, short form videos, and other trendy content, we can make Indigenous languages fun and modern again, breaking the stereotype of them being ‘archaic,’ so as to make them more appealing to the younger generations.
Meanwhile, our company is working toward the other front: making digital tools more Indigenous language-friendly. Apart from developing more language learning apps, we should also incorporate Indigenous languages into daily use — e.g., input methods for Indigenous language, simple translation tools for the translation of Indigenous languages, or even localization of game interfaces or dialogues into Indigenous languages. When Indigenous languages are utilized in digital products and services, it will help raise the awareness of young people around their own languages, while providing a sense of practicality and modernity of these languages.