Rodnei Cilto

The Jupy Project: Bringing Native South American languages to GNU/Linux

Debian prides itself on being the “Universal Operating System”, but modern technology still imposes Portuguese or Spanish as a prerequisite for using computers in South America. This linguistic barrier accelerates the cultural erasure and silencing of diverse communities. We believe free software is the only ecosystem capable of reversing this scenario, promoting true technological sovereignty and linguistic preservation. In this talk, we present the initial stages of the Jupy Project, which aims to implement native support for Native South American languages like Kaingang, Nheengatu, Guarani, and Ticuna in Linux. Using the Lux Lenovo OS (a Debian-based distro) as a practical laboratory, we will share technical localization obstacles, such as creating glibc locales, keyboard mapping, and font rendering. Our goal is to open a transparent dialogue about our main challenges: ensuring continuous maintenance and respectfully validating interfaces with the speaking communities. We invite the global Debian community to help us build architectural solutions and upstream contribution workflows that make Linux genuinely accessible to native languages.