Towards language preservation: Preliminary collection and vowel analysis of Indonesian ethnic speech data

Multilingualism in Indonesia gradually faces a state of catastrophe. Although several projects have been initiated for cultural preservation, the available technology that could support communication between elders and younger people within indigenous communities, as well as with people outside the community, is still very rare in Indonesia. This paper presents the first step of long-term development of speech-to-speech translation system from ethnic languages to English/Indonesian, which is collection and analysis of Indonesian ethnic speech corpora. Here, we will first focus on the two largest ethnic groups in Indonesia: Javanese and Sundanese.