Get the latest tech news

App designed by Indigenous people in W. Australia preserves language, culture

The remote town of Leonora, more than 800 kilometres from Perth, is an unlikely technology hub, but its only school has been chosen to launch a new app aimed at preserving language and culture.

He hopes the launch of the app, a collaboration between his local Aboriginal business and a Maori company in New Zealand, will inspire other Indigenous people to embrace new technology. Mr Muir, who co-wrote the bilingual app with his brother Talbot, calls it a 'family project', continuing his parents' work to preserve the Ngalia language by compiling a dictionary. Ngalia is at risk of being lost, but it's a dialect of Mantjiltjintjarra and very similar to Ngaanyatjarra: two Western Desert Aboriginal languages with many thousands of native speakers.

Get the Android app