Identification of Dialect for Eastern and S outhwestern O jibwe Words Using a Small Corpus (2023)

Abstract: The Ojibwe language has several dialects that vary to some degree in both spoken and written form. We present a method of using support vector machines to classify two different dialects (Eastern and Southwestern Ojibwe) using a very small corpus of text. Classification accuracy at the sentence level is 90% across a five-fold cross validation and 72% when the sentence-trained model is applied to a data set of individual words. Our code and the word level data set are released openly on Github at [link to be inserted for final version, working demonstration notebook uploaded with paper].

## introduction the ojibwe language is an indigenous language of the great lakes region of turtle island (north america) and is also known by many other names such as chippewa, ojibwemowin, anishinaabe, and anishinaabemowin. anishinaabemowin can also refer to the closely related tongues potawatomi, algonquin and odawa. an algonquian language, ojibwe and its many sub-dialects can be mapped geographically. though traditionally understood to be a prestigious language spoken by several peoples trading or living with/near the ojibwe, currently, ojibwe is mostly spoken by ojibwe people. while many ojibwe live on reservations and reserves of sovereign ojibwe tribes/first nations across anishinaabewaki, anishinaabe country, many also live in towns and cities outside of reservations and reserves. the number of native-level fluent speakers is unfortunately fast dwindling. it is estimated that there are around 50 native-level fluent speakers living today south of the medicine line (the american-canadian border), virtually all of whom are elders @xcite . most of these 50 older speakers are living on two reservations. there are at least 10,000 fluent speakers north of the medicine line, many of whom are also older (pangowish, 2023). the approximate distribution of current anishinaabemowin speakers is shown in figure 1 . according to the u.s. census @xcite and canadian encyclopedia @xcite , there are about 330,000 ojibwe living in anishinaabewaki, conservatively making around 3% of the ojibwe population fluent speakers. there are many efforts in place to try and stem ojibwe's decline. passing along the knowledge and practice of speaking the ojibwe language is an important part of maintaining ojibwe culture; language is identified as one of the four pillars of indigenous peoplehood by @xcite along with ceremonies, land, and sacred history. some say ojibwe identity itself is at risk if the language is no longer spoken @xcite and therefore ojibwemowin revitalization is one of the highest priorities for many language warriors. language courses, as well as immersion and spending time with elders, have been traditional tools of revitalizing anishinaabemowin @xcite . over the past couple decades, there have also been efforts to use more media technology as a tool for revitalizing the language @xcite . our work builds on this history. the rest of this paper is organized as follows. section 2 is split into three sub-sections: author and paper backgrounds are briefly reviewed in section 2.1, a brief overview of ojibwe dialects is covered in section 2.2, and a review of related work is presented in section 2.3. methodology used and discussion of the written corpus used is presented in section 3. a discussion of results is included in section 4. we summarize our work in section 5. we discuss the limitations of this work in the limitations section and share some of the ethical concerns raised by this work in the ethical statement. finally, we recognize and give thanks to the people who made this work possible in the acknowledgements. ## conclusions in this work, we have proposed and evaluated a method for identifying dialects in ojibwe given a small set of labeled examples. we showed that our method is 90% accurate at the single-sentence level and higher still at the multi-sentence scale. we also achieved a 72% accuracy when the sentence-level model was applied to a selected set of individual words. the model proposed also offers insight into how dialects are classified by the model, demonstrated by explaining the significance of some of the n-grams found to be most significant in determining dialect. this aspect of interpretability could offer language learners insight into features differentiating written dialects as well as providing a tool to help determine the dialect of unfamiliar text.