A true story, like thousands of others
My grandmother dreams in a language I was never taught.
She speaks te reo Māori (the Māori language of New Zealand). She is one of the last in our family who can.
Lantern learns from these alone. It never invents a word.
Lantern builds a language-learning app for languages that are disappearing.
Think of Duolingo. Now imagine a language so endangered that no one has ever built a course for it. Lantern builds that course from scratch, using only the handful of words people still remember.
recomputed live at /api/metrics
The corpus
Real phrases, the only thing it may learn from.
guardrail
Cited vocabulary
Every word traceable to a phrase.
An invented word never reaches a learner. Enforced in code, not in a prompt.
EveryEverytwotwoweeks,weeks,aalanguagelanguagetakestakesitsitslastlastbreath.breath.AAthousandthousandyearsyearsofofgrammar,grammar,story,story,andandsong,song,gonegoneunwritten,unwritten,becausebecausenonooneonehadhadthethetimetimetotowritewriteititdown.down.
Of the world’s 7,000 languages, nearly half are expected to fall silent within a lifetime. The reason is rarely that no one cares. It is that documenting a language and teaching it has always taken trained experts years, and most languages will never get that time.
spoken today
expected to vanish
days between each loss
Hers is on that list.
So we sat with her, and wrote down what she remembers.
Forty-one phrases. Greetings, the names for family, a few small sentences. That was all we had — and it was enough.
Then we handed them to Lantern.
A whole course took shape in minutes.
It started with her words
The forty-one phrases became the ground truth. They are the only thing Lantern is allowed to learn from.
It found the grammar hiding inside them
Lantern lined up her sentences and spotted a pattern: the verb never changes, and a small word in front of it carries the time.
It built a course you can take
Flashcards, pronunciation you can hear, and spaced repetition that brings each word back just before you would forget it. The kind of thing that normally takes linguists years.
And it keeps growing
Every new phrase she remembers, or anyone adds, makes the course richer. Her language stops shrinking and starts growing again.
This is the actual app, not a mockup.
Everything you see below was learned from those 41 phrases. Nothing was invented.
It never makes up a word.
An AI cannot truly know a language with fifty speakers left, because there is almost nothing to learn it from. Pretending would be a lie, and an insult to the people who carry it. So Lantern only ever uses her words. If it ever tries to build a sentence with a word she never said, the app deletes it automatically — checked in code, before anyone sees it.
guardrail.check.ts · 0 hallucinations · 100% cited
Everything a learner needs, generated from almost nothing.
A course for a language that never had one
No textbook, no app, no data online. Lantern starts from whatever words are left and builds the rest.
Never invents a word
Every word it teaches is real and cited. Anything it cannot trace to her words is rejected in code.
Hear every word
Built-in pronunciation, so you can speak it, not only read it.
Real grammar, discovered
It works out tense, plurals, and patterns from the examples it is given.
It grows every time someone uses it
Add a phrase and the whole course re-derives, richer. The record compounds instead of fading.
See it for yourself
Watch Lantern learn Māori from those 41 phrases.
Open the workspace: her words, the grammar it found, and a course you can take, right now in your browser.
No sign-up. The real app, running live.
say “hello”
Kia ora
hear itTenses it worked out
i haere · kei te haere · ka haere
She isn’t alone. These are languages people are fighting to keep.
One has about ten speakers left. Two were declared gone, then brought back by their children. Each is a light someone refuses to let go out.
These are the people whose words we carry.
Not abstractions — living communities keeping their languages alive. The same way Lantern cites every word, it cites every photo.
te reo Māori
From near-loss to kōhanga reo immersion nests and a Māori Language Act — proof a language can be carried forward. Photo: Schwede66, Te Matatini, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A language only dies when the
last person stops speaking it.
So we keep speaking. Light one, and see.