One of the winners of a scholarship from the Linux Foundation is involved in a project to preserve endangered South American languages, according to the Foundation.
Luis Camacho Caballero is aiming to port these languages to computer systems using automatic speech recognition. He will use Linux-based systems for the project.
Caballero, a Peruvian, was one of 14 It professionals to receive one of the 2016 scholarships.
He hopes to complete work on the first language, Quechua, which his grandparents spoke, by the end of 2017 and then begin work on other languages.
{loadposition sam08}In an interview with the Foundation, Caballero said Quechua was used in the Andean region between the fifth and 16th centuries and had a close association with Inca culture.
The language is spoken by about eight million people in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia but is under threat of extinction because the only language supported by the governments in these countries in Spanish.
Caballero said he gotten involved in the project after being exposed to automatic speech recognition for English six years ago. " I knew that I had to do ASR for Quechua, it's my contribution to preserve my heritage," he said.