Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation

Settler colonialism has led to ancestral language endangerment and extinction on a mass scale. It has also forced `global' languages such as English on Indigenous communities worldwide. In Australia, post-contact languages, including creoles, and local varieties of international languages emerged as a result of forced contact with English speakers. These contact varieties are widely used, but to date they have to-date been poorly supported by language technologies. This oversight presents barriers to participation in civil and economic society for Indigenous communities using these languages. It also reproduces minoritisation of contemporary Indigenous sociolinguistic identities. This paper concerns the question of whether (and, if so, how) Indigenous people may be supported by technologies for their non-ancestral languages. We argue that multiple real-world opportunities exist, and explore this position through a case study of a project which aims to improve Automated Speech Recognition for Australian Aboriginal English. We discuss how we integrated culturally appropriate processes into the project. We call for increased support for languages used by Indigenous communities, including contact varieties, providing practical economic and socio-cultural benefits.