...

General Information

...

How many people use FirstVoices?

• Our website attracts more than 350,000 visits every year

• Our apps, including the keyboards, are installed and active on more than 4,500 devices

Who uses FirstVoices?

• FirstVoices is used by Indigenous communities, language learners, educators, and the general public. It is also used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals, institutions and organizations.

• The majority of users are between the ages of 27-66. About 10% of our users are under the age of 25, and about 13% are over the age of 50

• Most of our registered users have identified themselves as: learning their own language (~45%), teachers/educators (26%), students / learners (14%). A small percentage is interested in learning a different language (5%).

...

Background Information on Indigenous Languages

...

How many Indigenous languages are there in BC?

B.C. is unique in Canada for its Indigenous language diversity. There are 7 Indigenous language families and 35 languages in B.C., representing 60% of the First Nations languages in Canada. View the Language Revitalization Fact Sheet for more in-depth information.

Why are initiatives like FirstVoices important?

...

What is data sovereignty and how does FirstVoices support data sovereignty?

Data sovereignty in an Indigenous context refers to the concept that data that comes from an Indigenous community should be owned and controlled by that community. Data sovereignty includes the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own language data. Technology can complicate this, and that is why FirstVoices takes data sovereignty seriously from both a legal and technical standpoint.

From a legal standpoint, data sovereignty is built into our copyright terms:

"All materials on this site are protected by copyright laws and are owned by the individual Indigenous language communities who created the archival content. Language and multimedia data available on this site is intended for private, non-commercial use by individuals. Any commercial use of the language data or multimedia data in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, is specifically forbidden except with the prior written authority of the owner of the copyright. Users may, subject to these Terms and Conditions, print or otherwise save individual pages for private use. However, language and/or multimedia data may not be modified or altered in any respect, merged with other data or published in any form, in whole or in part. The prohibited uses include "screen scraping," "database scraping" and any other activity intended to collect, store, reorganize or manipulate data on the pages produced by, or displayed on the FirstVoices websites."

From a technology standpoint, we ensure data sovereignty by hosting all FirstVoices content on Canadian servers which protects all data with Canadian data privacy laws. Canadian data privacy laws provide a higher level of protection than laws in the United States, since there is no unifying law governing data privacy generally across the United States.

Other principals or mandates that FirstVoices follows:

...

What are the FirstVoices keyboards?

The FirstVoices keyboards have been developed for both desktop and mobile devices, with 91 keyboards currently available through the Keyman software platform. The FirstVoices Keyboard App for both iPhone/iPad and Android mobile devices contains keyboard software for over 100 languages and includes First Nations languages in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, plus many languages in the USA.

When the FirstVoices Keyboard app is installed on a mobile phone or tablet, any of the 100+ custom keyboards can be activated in any application on the device. Users are able to select their keyboard(s) of choice within their email, social media, word processing or other apps, enabling unlimited communication in their mother language.

What are the FirstVoices apps?

The wealth of language data uploaded by Indigenous communities onto their FirstVoices language sites can now also be accessed through mobile apps. The app pulls content directly from entries on FirstVoices and functions with offline capabilities. The apps are updated throughout the year in order to ensure that the latest content that has been added to a language site also appears on the app. There are currently 18 FirstVoices language apps available.

How does FirstVoices render alphabets for different Indigenous languages?

FirstVoices uses Unicode and the BC Sans font to render characters for all Indigenous alphabets properly and accurately across the platform. Additionally, the development team has built a number of tools to ensure functionality like search and custom alphabetization work across all alphabets, including:

• A custom search system that prioritizes exact matches, but can also discern diacritic errors and other mistakes in both English as well as the Indigenous language

• Built-in functionality that automatically normalizes incorrect Unicode (confusable characters), based on the specific needs of each alphabet 

• Built-in functionality that can detect and ignore characters in words/phrases that aren't in that language alphabet

What is the difference between a font and a keyboard? Why do I (potentially) need both to type in an Indigenous language?

A font is the exact style of characters on a screen or page. Some commons fonts are "Times New Roman", "Helvetica", and "Arial". A keyboard is a piece of software that lets you type in a language – your standard keyboard is likely an English one, but you can install another keyboard on your computer that changes what is output when you type. As an example, if you install the Nłeʔkepmxcín keyboard, when you press the "9" key on your keyboard, it will type "ł" instead. 

During early digital language revitalization efforts, certain communities developed language-specific fonts, often referred to as font-encoded orthographies. These fonts ignore typical encoding in order to represent Indigenous characters in place of non-Indigenous characters. An example of this is the Heiltsuk Doulos and Heiltsuk Times fonts, which when downloaded and used renders “©” as “ǧ”. The issue with this is that unless that specific font is installed on a device, the “ǧ” will continue to render as “©”, meaning that the Indigenous language cannot be represented properly online, on social media, or via text messages. However, when using the Haiɫzaqvla (Heiltsuk) keyboard, the "ǧ" will display properly everywhere.

Certain fonts will render Indigenous characters better than others. For example, a font like BC Sans is designed specifically to ensure characters from BC Indigenous languages are all rendered properly. Other fonts may not show characters as accurately.

...

What technology is FirstVoices built in, and where is it hosted?

...