Hanoi Horton Crews has created a computer program designed to record and store language for teaching purposes. Representatives from Ms. Crews's company, Teaching, Restoring and Archiving International Language Software, which is based in Pennsylvania, visited the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton on October 25 to present the product.
"It's basically a full-fledged system that can teach and do anything you want it to do," said company president James Crews, who helped market the software to the tribe last month.
"We had excellent reviews from the presentation," he said, noting that it generally takes a few visits before consumers decide whether to purchase the $15,000 product. "It was their first time seeing it," he said.
According to Mr. Crews, Ms. Crews's Shinnecock ancestry dates back to the early 1600s. "Her family traces its roots to the oldest family in the reservation," he said, noting her desire to preserve her tribe's native language.
"It was designed to help the Shinnecocks restore their language," he said, adding that with few surviving speakers, many Native American languages are in danger of extinction. "A lot of tribes are down to the last speaker of their language. Even as we speak, another native tribe may lose its last speaker," he said. "With this program, you can permanently archive the native speakers."
The original program was completed in 2002, when it was presented at the Mashantucket Pequot Algonquian Language Revitalization Conference, a Native American language preservation convention, Mr. Crews said.
"It was in very rudimentary form with no speech capabilities," he said. "The response was, ‘If you can make it talk, we'll buy it.'"
The company accepted the challenge, Mr. Crews said, and improved the software to its maximum potential.
"Now we can put words, phrases, songs, videos, illustrations, just about anything you want on it," he said, adding that his company is currently in sales negotiations with three Native American tribes. "We expect to finalize the sale within the next year," he said.
While the program was originally designed to save Native American language, Mr. Crews said, it soon attracted a more diverse audience. "That's how the whole thing started," he said, "but as we developed it, people started asking, ‘Can it teach our language?'"
Indeed, Mr. Crews said, because the consumer provides the vocabulary, TRAILS software can be used to teach any language. "It's directed to everyone interested in education," he said, adding that he hopes the software will become a standard tool for teaching languages around the world. "We feel the international community can benefit from it," he said.