Why This Project Exists

This project was born out of concern over the declining use of the Dusun language, especially among the younger generation. It is feared that in less than 50 years, Dusun may become extinct, as most current speakers are from the older generation.

One major cause for this decline is that many parents no longer speak Dusun at home. Instead, the national language is used in daily communication with children, contributing to language shift and eventual loss.

The Lack of Online Resources

The internet currently lacks sufficient material to support learning or preservation of the Dusun language. To reverse this trend, we need to contribute as much online content as possible—dictionaries, examples, reading material, and anything that can be used by learners and language models.

One key example is the Iban language, which is already supported on Google Translate. A major factor in Iban’s success is the large volume of Iban-language content available online, which helped train Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems and AI.

What This Project Includes

1. Dusun Translator – An AI-powered tool to translate English and Malay phrases into Dusun and Dusun into English/English. This module is still in progress and expected to be uploaded by end of the year. Unlike Google Translate, this tool uses custom logic and hand-crafted Dusun grammar rules, not NMT—at least for now.
2. Dusun Dictionary – A database of Dusun words and short phrases, meant to serve as daily-use references. The dictionary is updated regularly and open to public suggestions. It may also serve as valuable data for future AI and NMT training to help bring Dusun to platforms like Google Translate.
3. Learning Dusun Grammar & Usage – A structured lesson module covering key aspects of the Dusun language, including sentence construction, pronouns, negation, affixes, adjectives, prepositions, demonstratives, interrogatives, and more. This section is continually updated to include new insights and examples, with a focus on natural usage rather than formal textbook rules.
4. Dusun Quizzes – An interactive module to test your comprehension and proficiency (mostly on sentence structures and affixes) through multiple-choice questions.

Looking Ahead

I hope that Dusun Dictionary (and the other linked modules) will, in some small way, help young people reconnect with their mother tongue. I also encourage more Dusun speakers and language lovers to build their own online dictionaries, contribute translations, or write blog and social media content in Dusun. Every bit helps form the parallel corpora — bilingual text datasets — needed to train AI and NMT tools to understand and sustain the language.