App helps Brazilians to connect

– For Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon, getting online is a challenge. Now, a smartphone app is making it easier to connect by allowing them to use their own native languages.

Hyper-connected Brazil has more cellphones than people – over 250 million, for a population of 203 million, according to communications consultancy Teleco.

But even when they have smartphones and internet connections, the sprawling country’s 1.7 million indigenous inhabitants have often been excluded from the connectivity revolution, since devices typically have keyboards in Brazilian Portuguese and not indigenous languages.

“Linklado”, an app developed by two young friends from the Amazon region, offers a fix. It is a digital keyboard enabling native communities to write with the mix of Latin letters, bars, swoops, accents and other marks used in many indigenous alphabets in Brazil.

Launched in 2022, it is helping indigenous users communicate with each other and the world, whether from far-flung villages deep in the Amazon or the cities and towns that dot the region.

“Linklado has done so much good for Indigenous peoples, including me,” said Cristina Quirino Mariano, a member of the Ticuna people. “Before, we couldn’t write on our cellphones. Now we can.”

The original inhabitants of the land now known as Brazil had oral traditions before Portuguese colonisers arrived in the 16th century.

When Europeans began writing down these languages, they denoted the different sounds by adapting the Latin alphabet with symbols known as “diacritics”.

But these alphabets were unavailable on cellphones – until now.

The situation “left indigenous people sending audio messages on their phones, because they couldn’t write exactly what they wanted to say”, said Noemia Ishikawa, Linklado’s project coordinator.

Today, “the app works for every indigenous language in the Amazon”, around 40 in all, said Juliano Portela, who developed it with a friend, Samuel Benzecry.

Both natives of the Amazon region in northern Brazil, the pair are now studying in the United States. –