Screenshot of the two stories currently available on the Gitksan app, written by Dr. Jane Smith and illustrated by Michelle Stoney.

By Cassidy Muir

A Gitksan online dictionary app was launched this spring as a collaborative effort between members of the Gitxan nation and a research team at the University of British Columbia.

Aidan Pine, the app’s developer, said it started as part of his undergraduate honors research.

“[Barbara Harris], Hector Hill, and Vincent Gogag were three speakers of the Gitksan language that were working down in Vancouver with us. I had been working for a number of years at that point on the dictionary, and we had a web version that was being worked on, but we didn’t have any plans on working it into a mobile app,” said Pine. “Time came for me to choose a research topic and that’s what I chose, was to develop a mobile app of the dictionary.”

Since then, the project has grown and gone through various transformations.

“The coding of it I started in September 2015,” Pine said. “I ended up generalizing it to allow other languages to sort of use it. It’s used by about 15 other languages right now, as well as Gitksan, through a partnership with FirstVoices, which is a branch of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council down on Vancouver Island here.”

Collaborators from various backgrounds and disciplines have played a part in making the app a reality.

“I would develop, I would write the code, and then I’d have an idea and kind of send it around the lab, and see if they liked this aspect or that aspect,” Pine said. “I was talking with Dr. Jane Smith — who is Gitxan, and teaches at the elementary school in Hazelton — and she had been mentioning that she had a lot of books, and that she was having a hard time publishing.”

Pine said Dr. Smith donated some of her stories and recorded audio.

“We kind of collaborated on the stories and histories section of the dictionary app, which is a couple of her books that she wrote and that a woman named Michelle Stoney illustrated.”

The app has already gained traction, rising briefly to the top spot in Google Play’s education category and gaining around 500 downloads in the first week after its launch. There are high hopes regarding its role in the revitalization of the language.

“It’s not that the app is the end goal,” Pine said.

“It’s the people like Jane Smith writing the stories that go into the app, it’s people like Hector Hill, Barbara Harris, and Vincent Gogag who are motivated enough to do all of that really hard work to record all of the words for the dictionary. That’s the real value of having an app, is that it kind of showcases the really amazing work that people are doing, and kind of augments it as opposed to being the end result. I already overheard people when I was over in Gitsegukla for an app launch, they were saying, ‘Oh, this is so exciting, we’re going to record some stories ourselves and get it on there.’ I guess it’s a bit of wind in people’s sails, hopefully.”

The app is available in the Apple store and on Google Play, or it can be accessed at mothertongues.org/gitksan.



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Gitksan app’s “about” page open in the mobile app.