Role of NLP for Corpus Development of Endangered Languages

Language plays a crucial role in preserving culture in our society and acts as a repository of traditional knowledge, memories, values, practices and unique worldviews that have been used, transformed and practiced in the form of language since millennia. It is estimated that there are more than 6000 spoken languages today that are in danger. UNESCO regularly publishes a list of endangered languages, based on a 5-scale classification system such as: vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. It is worrying to know that most of Odisha's indigenous languages are coming under these above factors. Safeguarding and reinvigorating these languages has become crucial for maintaining and preserving the cultural diversity of the society. On account of this, the present paper discusses how Natural Language Processing (NLP), in collaboration with linguistics, can help to revive endangered languages by developing a methodology to build a corpus for the lesserknown endangered indigenous languages of Odisha, some of which have no existing script. The purpose of this paper is to serve researchers/professionals working on low resource languages with a complete guideline for classifying languages and collecting corpus considering language diversity, style and achievable issues.