Yen Mžue

Indigenous Taiwanese poet preserving Paiwan language through digital archiving

Yen Mžue (b. 1978), a Paiwan Nation poet from Taiwan, has created a revolutionary model for preserving endangered languages. Her Digital Oral Poetry Project combines AI voice recognition with traditional storytelling, cataloguing 10,000+ Paiwan phrases since 2015.

By developing the first open-source Paiwan language app, Yen enabled youth to learn ancestral idioms through augmented reality. This tech-integrated approach increased Paiwan speakers under 30 by 300%—a breakthrough in linguistic preservation. Her poetry collections like 《Voices from the Mountain》 fuse indigenous cosmology with digital art.

Yen's TED Talk on Decolonizing Technology went viral in 2022, influencing UNESCO's policy on digital heritage. She collaborates with MIT Media Lab to create language-preservation algorithms adaptable to other endangered tongues like Ainu and Navajo.