UW Continuum College teams up with campus partners to offer fee-based graduate degrees designed for working professionals like Lonny Strunk, who’s using his UW master’s degree in computational linguistics to help keep Yup’ik, his native language, available, accessible and alive.
Lonny Strunk grew up in the small Yup’ik community of Kuinerraq (Quinhagak, Alaska), which sits south of Nome along the Bering Sea. From kindergarten through third grade, Lonny attended school in his native language of Yup’ik before his schooling switched abruptly to English.
“For me, that’s where the transmission of the language ends,” Lonny says. “I acquired the language and understood what was said to me, but my speaking ability wasn’t there.”
As an undergrad at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Lonny studied Yup’ik, and he noticed that — despite it being the second-most-spoken Indigenous language in North America and the language of Alaska’s largest Native population — there were scant online resources for those wishing to learn it.
“There’s not a lot of audio, video or interactive Yup’ik resources available,” Lonny says. “The language data isn't accessible on the internet. It lives on people's hard drives or in print.”
I looked for programs with a focus on under-resourced and endangered languages. When I learned more about the UW, I knew they could help me pursue my goal of making Yup’ik a first-class language online.
— Lonny Strunk, Alum, UW Master of Science in Computational Linguistics
After graduating with a degree in computer science, Lonny sought to use his computer savvy to create the kind of vibrant, interactive online dictionary that could help make Yup’ik come alive for a new generation of speakers. He found the perfect program to help him realize his dream in the UW Master of Science in Computational Linguistics.
“I looked for programs with a focus on under-resourced and endangered languages,” he says. “When I learned more about the UW, I knew they could help me pursue my goal of making Yup’ik a first-class language online.”
That’s just what Lonny’s done. With his UW’s Master of Science in Computational Linguistics, Lonny is deepening the understanding of the Yup’ik language and allowing to people gain a new perspective on Indigenous culture. All while ensuring the language remains accessible for everyone.
“We're lucky because we have Yup’ik people out there teaching and speaking the language, but you have to be in the specific areas that have these opportunities,” Lonny says. “I want to make it possible for anyone to go on the website and get the information they need, but also to be encouraged and inspired to look up and learn more.”
Making a Complex Language Accessible
Yup'ik is a polysynthetic language, meaning that its words are composed of many morphemes — word parts that have independent meanings but may not be able to stand alone. Polysynthetic languages often employ long “sentence-words,” like the Yup'ik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq, which comprises seven morphemes to say, “He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer."
The polysynthetic aspect of Yup'ik allows words to “become as complex as your mind can hold all the information,” Lonny explains.
The goal of computational linguists is to help machines process human language — e.g., search engines, predictive text messaging, speech recognition and machine translation all require computational linguistics. Lonny enrolled in the UW master’s program to use the power of neural methods to create a word analyzer that could help illuminate Yup’ik’s rich intricacy.
“I realized that many applications rely on statistical methods that require a lot of language data that Yup’ik doesn’t have readily available,” Lonny says. “Looking at the language technology efforts for other endangered languages during my master’s program, I noticed many of the researchers were creating rule-based, finite-state morphological analyzers that only require a dictionary and a reference grammar to encode the grammatical rules.”
Because Yup’ik words are composed of complex, inflected morphemes with multiple possible meanings, Lonny saw that a Yup’ik word analyzer could serve as the foundation to create similar programs for other less-spoken languages that lacked an online presence. By applying his knowledge and skill to better understand his language, Lonny could help others understand — and keep alive — their own.
My hope is that other speakers and language programs will be able to use these resources to keep these languages alive. Knowing your native language is so important in terms of understanding and accessing your cultural identity and worldview.
— Lonny Strunk, Alum, UW Master of Science in Computational Linguistics
“Since Yup’ik is a polysynthetic language, I felt like my project was a perfect first step toward creating more language technology applications,” he says.
The fruits of his labor — Lonny’s thesis “A Finite-State Morphological Analyzer for Central Alaskan Yup’ik” — allows users to break down the discrete parts of Yup’ik words.
“With the word analyzer, you’re able to put a super complex word in, learn it’s made up of five pieces and click on each one to see the dictionary entry,” says Lonny. Users then understand how to build a word, and once they know the constituent parts, they can adjust the tense, subject, object, verb, etc., to create new words and phrases.
Since creating the word analyzer, Lonny’s project has expanded to include a word builder, example dialogues and sentence builders, all with links to dictionary entries that reveal morphemes and include audio recordings of Native speakers pronouncing the words — a tangible, audible piece of Yup’ik culture, wherever you are.
Spreading the Word(s) Far and Wide
After completing his initial project in 2020, Lonny connected with Christopher Egalaaq Liu, another Yup’ik software developer who founded Yuarcuun Technologies, which was working on creating an online, searchable Yup’ik dictionary. Lonny, Christopher and developer Laura Domine worked to integrate the word analyzer into the site. After a few months of passionate dedication, found their partnership to be a fruitful one — and worth continuing.
Since then, Lonny and Yuarcuun have partnered with Native tribes and organizations to pursue grant-funded language technology projects that will benefit their communities, including an online North Slope Iñupiaq dictionary, an archive of 100 interviews with Yup’ik elders and the Naaqerkat App, which contains a library of 36 Yugtun books.
Through the development of these resources, Lonny is empowering his elders and peers to share their experiences and traditions to nurture future Indigenous generations. By making this rich history accessible to anyone with an internet connection, Lonny has also created a space where people from different backgrounds can learn about Alaskan Indigenous language, cultures and history.
“My hope is that other speakers and language programs will be able to use these resources to keep these languages alive,” Lonny says. “Knowing your native language is so important in terms of understanding and accessing your cultural identity and worldview.”