Every two weeks, there is a language that disappears. By the call of the United Nations, by the end of this century, half of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world will all not be alive. This boom reverses to constitute considerable degradation regarding cultural visibility.
Noam Chomsky said that a language is more than words and serves a particular purpose to a particular society. His feelings were that language is used to express ideas and guide behavior, hence maintaining a long-standing tradition within these communities that are based on their individual realities.
To tackle this issue my colleagues from the Anglia Ruskin University StoryLab research institute and I — together with our creative industry partner NowHere Media — are researching ways in which virtual reality (VR) technology and immersive storytelling can be used to breathe new life into endangered indigenous cultures and languages.
Our in-depth interviews with respondents show that immersive storytelling can effectively strengthen group identity and support the enduring preservation of cultural heritage when co-created with communities.
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A project had come up earlier developed by NowHere Media. Kusunda VR is an interactive immersive film made to let the viewer learn essential words of an endangered language in Nepal- Kusunda. The film approaches the storyline of the nomadic lifestyle of the Kusunda community while peppering the film with language through interviews with the last surviving speakers.
NowHere Media collaborated with one of the last 150 speakers of the Kusunda language—a shaman, Lil Bahadur, and his granddaughter Hima to document the languaculture and nomadic lifestyle. would be a volumetric filmed and photogrammetry experience (two techniques that create a 3D environment that can be immersive and realistic) for virtual reality (VR) technology. Viewers would be able to interact via voice and learn various words in the Kusunda language.
At 18, almost losing his native language when he moved to the city from his hunter-gatherer way of life nearly killed Lil's linguistic potential. Researchers found that his teenage granddaughter is keen to keep not only her grandfather's language alive but his culture as well.
Hima said to us, "If the Kusunda language is lost, it is the vanishing of Kusunda as a people in Nepal. It is the obliteration of our identity, which is why I have resolved to hold our language."
Under the guidance of Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda, one of the very few remaining speakers who had carried forward the language so dedicatedly, she began her journey in learning the language. Gyani Maiya is the protagonist of the primary storyline in Kusunda VR but she passed away in 2020 at the age of 83 during the film’s production.
StoryLab was also granted funds from the British Academy to evaluate how immersive technology can be used to revitalize endangered languages. In our research project, Reviving Kusunda, we contrast the value of the interactive VR experience of Kusunda with a short film produced as part of the project to provide examples that will enable a better understanding of how immersion technologies help or fail to elicit emotional understanding of a topic as compared with traditional film.
For over a century, cultural heritage in terms of oral traditions, languages, and traditional art forms has largely been recorded and maintained in cultural memory through films which happen to be an important 2D audio-visual format. We are interested to further interrogate how these new technologies - virtual reality and augmented reality - stand up against older audio-visual formats.
Both Kusunda individuals and the UK public perceived several advantages from the use of multiple formats. Nonetheless, they leaned heavily towards preference for virtual reality. They asserted that interactivity and immersion of content were two key factors that would help grab the viewers’ interest in the subject matter. In the narrative, VR brings the viewer in and this immersion is a vital element in reanimating the stories and memories of days gone by.
The VR content proved to grab the attention of the audiences pretty well as well as create a connection to the topic. An increased interest was also there to look deeper into endangered languages and cultural heritage, but the motivation was only towards the audience.
Users reported that it felt like they were a character in the movie when they were experiencing the VR, getting to be right there within the action, which creates a deep emotional connection. They underlined the need to really "feel" like the Kusunda. This opens lots of room for the application of VR in language revitalization and heritage at risk.
The Reviving Kusunda project should illustrate that opportunity for older speakers to work with younger generations makes for a very lively way to teach a language. We see colossal opportunities; to use 3D immersive storytelling for revitalization of other endangered languages.
Building on the successes of the Reviving Kusunda project, StoryLab leads a €3 million Horizon Europe project called Revive. It is a project developing the activities to be conducted with respect to two endangered languages in Europe: Griko, used in some areas of Southern Italy; and Cornish, which is a language spoken in Cornwall in the southwest of England.
This initiative assembles a worldwide team of academic and industrial partners to study the integrated use of immersive technologies, data visualization, archival research, and co-creation in protecting Europe's cultural heritage and its stores of language.
Its mission is to develop dynamic, interactive solutions for museums and visitor centers that convey the essence of cultural phenomena and, in the meanwhile, become specialized to serve formal language teaching within the structured environment of schools and colleges for generations to come.
All parties participating in the Reviving Kusunda project acknowledged that VR has this unique potential to breathe life into the heritage aspects very vividly, in turn making the intangible very tangible.
One of the members expressed, "When I experienced the VR today, it felt like I was there listening to the stories that my grandma would share, and these stories appeared right in front of me as real.
This article republished from The Conversation. Read the original article.
