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CC BY SA, Photo by Ishaku Andrawus

Preserving linguistic diversity using Internet in a Box. Experiences from the UNHCR refugee camp of Minawao (Cameroon)

Pierpaolo Di Carlo¹, Goudi John, Tim Moody, and Jeff Good²

¹University of Naples “L’Orientale”, ²University at Buffalo

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Pierpaolo Di Carlo

Meet the Core Team

Linguist, Project Director

Goudi John

Activist, Technical Manager

Tim Moody

Internet in a Boxer, Enabler

Jeff Good

Linguist, Co-Director

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Language endangerment & language documentation
The linguistic situation in the UNHCR camp of Minawao
Internet in a box: what is it and how are we using it?
Our ongoing projects to preserve endangered languages
Future prospects

What we’re going to talk about

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Language endangerment and language documentation

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95% percent of the world’s people use 6% of the world’s languages

Source: https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/

94% of the world’s languages are used by 5% of the world’s people

The vast majority of these languages are not written (or only barely written)

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Source: Wichmann (2005:129)

Number of first language users by language rank

How can knowledge about these languages be made available?

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Language endangerment

Many of the world’s 7,000 languages face extinction.

Among the main causes

mobility and migration →

interruption of intergenerational transmission

More or less voluntary mobility, e.g. for economic reasons (urbanization)
Forced displacement, e.g. due to climate or security crises

Drawn by Stephen Jones

Moreover, many of these languages are severely endangered and perhaps around half of the world’s current languages will no longer be used by the end of the century. There are many factors that contribute to language endangerment, but an important set of factors is mobility and migration. Some of this migration is more or less voluntary—or, at least, not triggered by violence and conflict. Economic migration would fall into this category. There is also an increasing amount of migration resulting from forced displacement, for instance, due to climate change or political violence (which, of course, can be interrelated). We are especially interested in supporting language documentation efforts for the latter category of migrants in the work discussed here. As you can see in this chart, only two African countries listed among the top 10 countries for language endangerment. These are Nigeria and Cameroon, the countries relevant to this work.

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Language documentation

In recent decades, linguists have engaged in extensive efforts to document endangered languages

Emphasizes collection of naturalistic recordings of spoken and signed languages
Creates detailed metadata to facilitate archiving of materials
Annotates the materials as much as possible
Values supporting communities to lead the documentation of their languages

Source: Endangered Languages Archive

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The linguistic situation in the UNHCR camp of Minawao (northern Cameroon)

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With ca. 400 languages, this strip of hilly land is one of the hotspots of linguistic diversity—and endangerment—in the world.

Nigeria-Cameroon borderland

1600 km

By Aquintero82 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

2013-2014 peak of terrorist attacks in NE Nigeria. Local populations escape. Many thousands crossed Cameroon’s border, taking along their languages.

Mandara mts. & Boko Haram

30 km

Minawao

Founded in 2013, Minawao is a UNHCR refugee camp, currently housing ca. 50,000 refugees coming from no less than 25 different communities.

1 km

Nigeria and Cameroon: put together, there are somewhere between 700 and 900 spoken in these countries. A good chunk of this incredible linguistic diversity is concentrated in the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland. One of the many sub-areas located in this strip of hilly land is called “the Mandara Mountains”. This is where our work is unfolding.

In this map, each of the small numbers corresponds to a separate language. Look at the scale: this segment is 30km in the real world, so you can see that every, say, 5km or so, we find a different language. This is the norm in the Mandara Mountains. You all know Boko Haram, right? Mostly young, jobless, desperate men who, under the influence of self-defining “Islamic reformists”, committed unspeakable atrocities since 2009. In 2013 and 2014 Boko Haram became so powerful and violent that it pushed all the people who were living in these areas out of their villages to seek refuge elsewhere. Several thousands crossed the border with Cameroon and brought along their languages.

In 2013, the UNHCR built a camp, Minawao, to protect them, and this is where thousands of refugees settled over the past 12 years. When I was there in 2023, residents were more than 80,000. Today, after substantial cuts to international aid, the population has shrunk to ca. 50,000 people. The diversity of the refugee population, however, stays the same: there are no less than 25 different language communities living today in the camp. Some speak a language that very few people speak outside of the camp. These are extremely endangered languages.

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Everyone was multilingual in a number of local, small languages plus Hausa, the local lingua franca. Local languages were commonly used in the household and among people who knew them (friends, relatives, etc).

Before displacement

Everyone is multilingual, but newer generations are adapting to the new environment: French, Fulfulde, and English are learned, and Hausa is used in everyday conversation, even by family members. Local small languages have very little power in the new environment

After displacement

CC BY-NC SA, photo by Gerhard Muller-Kosack

CC BY-NC SA, photo by Sunday Bitrus

This is not a linguistics conference, but I think it’s important to understand the basics of these processes of endangerment. Before moving from the Mandara Mountains, the norm was for people to be proficient in a number of local, small languages plus the dominant lingua franca of the area, which is Hausa. Only the few who completed the secondary school would be able to speak English.

Now in the camp, everyone is still multilingual but youth are adapting to completely different environment: those who go to school may learn French, or English, and the local lingua franca in the area of Minawao is Fulfulde, which is very different from Hausa. In this new ecology, the languages that people brought along from the Mandara Mountains have little to no value, plus there are no shrines for traditional religions nor places where communities can really practice other aspects of their culture. In this situation, languages are not being passed on through generations and, as a matter of fact, they might disappear as soon as the elders die out.

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Glavda women perform a traditional dance, UNHCR camp of Minawao, June 2025. CC BY SA photo by Ishaku Andraus

Most indigenous languages in the camp are fading out

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Can open-source and relatively low-tech solutions help local communities preserve their languages and cultures?

Minawao Youth

Documenting endangered languages

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Internet in a Box

Tim Moody

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What is Internet in a Box (IIAB)?

A small Wifi hotspot to make Internet content available where Internet access is unavailable, or limited due to cost or other restrictions.
A collective of people who develop that device
An aggregate of free/open software and content
Used in both Medical and Educational settings

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What does it look like?

Often based on Raspberry Pi
‘W’ for low cost deployments
Full model 4 B + and new 5
Also Intel NUC for more capacity
Or refurbished older desktops/laptops

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How do I access it?

Wifi is Internet in a Box or External Router
Phone, Laptop, or Tablet
Many devices go directly to Home Page
For others put http://box.lan in browser

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How was it set up for Minawao?

Needed a place to Collect and Share Community Videos where they could be easily uploaded and easily found through navigation
Needed a Cloud-like Archive for language documentation, annotations, and other metadata
Wanted some Educational or Reference Material generally available
So we added some Services and Content in Admin Console

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How do I get it?

Buy it with a curation for a particular audience:

Wiki Project Med Foundation, Inc.
https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/D39CVYZN5FUB2
Growing list of distributors

Download a ‘Starter’ image from https://iiab.me/local_content/images/

Write to sd card and get started
Customize content

DiY with scripts that do an entire install

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Our ongoing projects

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Can open-source and relatively low-tech solutions help local communities preserve their languages and cultures?

Minawao Youth

Documenting endangered languages

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Project started in February 2024
Motto: “My culture, our future”
Goal: Reconnect camp residents with their original cultures and languages
Strategy: Media production and dissemination both online (Facebook page) and offline (local IIAB network)
Hardware: Vlogger kits, audio recorder, computers, modem, Raspberry Pi 4 mounting IIAB
UNHCR-sponsored Multimedia Center (LAN, computers, etc.)

Minawao Youth

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Minawao Youth

Traditional games

Traditional tools

Arts & crafts

Citizen journalism

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Minawao Youth

Training

Target selection

Videos are created

Facebook page

Internet-in-a-Box

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Can open-source and relatively low-tech solutions help local communities preserve their languages and cultures?

Minawao Youth

Documenting endangered languages

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Supported by a grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)
Target languages: Chinene and Dghwede, two of the smallest languages both within and outside the camp
Where is IIAB coming in handy?

Training local collaborators
Possibility to have local communities really access project output (videos) in near-real time
Facilitating collaboration among outside and local linguists.

Language documentation

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Supported by a grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)
Target languages: Chinene and Dghwede, two of the smallest languages both within and outside the camp
Where is IIAB coming in handy?

Training local collaborators
Possibility to have local communities really access project output (videos) in near-real time
Facilitating collaboration among outside and local linguists.

Language documentation

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Resources (videos, audios, photos)

Collaborative environment

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Writing techniques for unwritten Chadic languages

Stage 1: in-person training

Stage 2: follow-up activities

1. listening-watching

2. writing

3. sharing

As a first step, we organized a 2-day in-person training in the camp, led by Ndokobai Dadak, a linguist from the University of Maroua collaborating with the project, during which 20 trainees were introduced to the basic techniques of phonetic and phonological transcription, and to a slightly modified alphabet that can be used to transcribe the majority of the sounds of the languages of this area.

We then organized follow-up activities to allow trainees to practice what they had learnt in the in-person sessions. All the trainees are speakers of one or the other local language, so they could have practiced transcribing at any time. Yet, we wanted everyone to be exposed to the same initial stimuli.

We did this by creating a series of short videos featuring local language speakers pronouncing individual words. These videos were uploaded to our Internet-in-a-Box, specifically to a shelf in Calibre Web labeled “Training Exercises.”

When trainees gathered at the multimedia center, accessed the videos using their smartphones or computers, and typed what they heard in a text document.

They then uploaded their written answers to their personal folders in Nextcloud. When the IIAB is connected to the internet, instructors can remotely access these folders to review the trainees’ work. The training will conclude next week with a final in-person session. During this one-day meeting, the instructor will go over common mistakes and clarify any doubts based on everyone’s submitted exercises.

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Trainees in writing techniques, July 30, 2025, Minawao

CC BY-NC SA, photo by Ishaku Andrawus

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Some final remarks

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Our project builds on this foundation, but shifts the paradigm.

IIAB historically used as a one-way system: content is preloaded and distributed to users.

From one- to two-way knowledge mobility

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From one- to two-way knowledge mobility

Users can contribute, comment, and upload data locally.
Community participation becomes central, not end-point.
New contents are accessible offline and, if creators agree, online.

We are developing IIAB as a two-way platform:

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Thank you! Uss badek-deka! Uss ling lingeh! Uss na kada-kada! Na gode! Godiya ngiina! Uss zhik-zhike! Susi ngaya! Uss badek dekah! Yathafa waruwa!

WikiProject Med
UNHCR
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
U.S. National Science Foundation
University at Buffalo, University of Naples “L’Orientale”
Shanti Bhardwa, Harpal Punia, Adam Holt, Ndokobai
All the participants in our projects in Minawao!

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Resources

IIAB demo at https://iiab.me/home/
IIAB docs at https://github.com/iiab/iiab/wiki
IIAB FAQ at https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ
IIAB Code at https://github.com/iiab/iiab
Wikipedia Support https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box
IIAB DIY at http://d.iiab.io
pierpaolo.dicarlo@unior.it and Facebook page for more info
Send us your feedback (it would be quite helpful, thanks in advance!)