  More than 43% of the languages spoken in the world are endangered, and
language loss currently occurs at an accelerated rate because of globalization
and neocolonialism. Saving and revitalizing endangered languages has become
very important for maintaining the cultural diversity on our planet. In this
work, we focus on discussing how NLP can help revitalize endangered languages.
We first suggest three principles that may help NLP practitioners to foster
mutual understanding and collaboration with language communities, and we
discuss three ways in which NLP can potentially assist in language education.
We then take Cherokee, a severely-endangered Native American language, as a
case study. After reviewing the language's history, linguistic features, and
existing resources, we (in collaboration with Cherokee community members)
arrive at a few meaningful ways NLP practitioners can collaborate with
community partners. We suggest two approaches to enrich the Cherokee language's
resources with machine-in-the-loop processing, and discuss several NLP tools
that people from the Cherokee community have shown interest in. We hope that
our work serves not only to inform the NLP community about Cherokee, but also
to provide inspiration for future work on endangered languages in general. Our
code and data will be open-sourced at
https://github.com/ZhangShiyue/RevitalizeCherokee
