Reclaiming our Mohawk heritage, one app-supplied word at a time

Welcome to , an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.

Some nights when I put my four-year-old daughter to bed, after we’ve read through her latest favourite library books, she asks me to teach her some Mohawk words. 

Mohawk is the language of my mother, and besides the numbers one through 10 and various farm animals, my children don’t hear any of these words spoken in our house, or their grandparents’ house. So on those nights, I open the Speak Mohawk app on my iPhone. 

We scroll past images of someone from my community playing lacrosse to find a category we feel like tackling –  perhaps greetings, traditional foods, or wild animals. An audio recording lets us know how we should say it, and then my daughter usually pushes the record button so we can compare her version to the expert’s pronunciation. 

The language is polysynthetic, with lengthy words comprised of many meaningful parts, or morphemes. The Mohawk language also has about 12 letters in its alphabet, and some letters are pronounced differently than they would be in English – Ts are pronounced as Ds and Ks are Gs. I usually wind up selecting to the shortest words possible – “ani:tas” (skunk) is a favorite. 

While there is no shortage of available – Duolingo and busuu are the majors, teaching English, French, German, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, and more – the language app we used is from a tech company that specializes in Indigenous language apps. 

Thornton Media is based out of Las Vegas, and was founded by Don Thornton (Cherokee) in 1994. He and his wife, Kara, spend up to 200 days a year on the road, working with Native tribes and Indigenous communities across the U.S. and Canada to document many endangered languages, taking their photographs and recording their voices.  

While they are dedicated to aiding language revitalization, Don says that an app by itself will not bring back a language that many people are no longer speaking or hearing. 

“You need to have communication between people to actually teach a language, but it can be a very valuable tool in that effort,” he adds.

Teaching my daughter some of her maternal ancestor’s words makes me feel that we’re connecting to my relatives, and also benefits her growing curious brain. shows that children learning a second language in their early years can reap the benefits of several cognitive skills, and have improved academic outcomes in schools.

The Thornton’s first app used recordings of Don’s grandmother’s speaking Cherokee words and phrases. Called Cherokee Basic, it was the first Indigenous language learning app in the App Store, in 2008 (and the first of its kind in the Android store).

Language Pal is also their most popular app. They are hesitant to put an age limit on it because users of the app are often beginning speakers of any age.

“We try to make our Language Pal apps as flexible as we can, so that it can be used with all different types of language revitalization programs,” says Don, adding that can be in classroom teaching, at home, or in a master/apprentice program. 

“A lot of language teachers have told us that one of the reasons they find it very useful even if they go to an immersion school and have 6-8 hours of language classes, but at home the parents don’t speak the language,” says Kara. 

She says that the Language Pal app helps parents learn the language so they can speak a few phrases to their kids at home, or order food in a restaurant. Sometimes the app will have a lullaby in the language so little babies at a very young age can hear it. 

“Hearing is one of the first steps in learning a language,” she says.

The company recently released a Storybook Grammar app targeted to preschoolers through grade five. Maskosis Goes to School is an animated app following a boy’s entire day, from waking up in the morning and getting ready to go to school, to going to bed at night and is based on feedback from some of Thornton Media’s 220 clients, 

Made for the Samson Cree Nation’s language of Maskwacis Cree, users are able to tap on hotspots, like the drum in the bedroom or the classroom’s books, to hear the pronunciation. 

Don proudly details how the Maskosis app demystifies different conjugations and verbs, past present and future tense, and singular and plural rules, using animation.

“We try to keep it fun,” he says, and my daughter and I can attest that they’ve succeeded. We tap away at the hotspots, even though Maskwacis Cree is a language spoken 2,000 miles away from us. 

We’ve never heard it before, but as it stands, my daughter has barely heard Mohawk either. Until we open up the Speak Mohawk app, that is, and try out words that we otherwise wouldn’t be hearing in our home. 

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