Low-resourced and marginalized languages suffer from generational attrition, with dwindling incentives for younger speakers to learn a language to which they may be linked culturally but which offers limited opportunities for use in education, employment, and other domains of everyday life. Gamification techniques and the integration of digital support structures may hold considerable potential for language revitalization and digitization efforts. This work explores a research design that explores approaches targeting both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for learners of Kurdish varieties across three contrasting learning environments. By running comparable conditions in environments that differ sharply in institutional pressure, cost, and voluntariness, we aim to produce a multifaceted account of how gameful design and behavior-oriented guidance interact with learner contexts, and thereby inform future initiatives in low-resource language learning.

The Middle East is characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity, with over 400 million inhabitants speaking more than 60 languages across multiple language families. This study presents a pioneering work in developing the first parallel corpora for eight severely under-resourced varieties in the region–PARME, addressing fundamental challenges in low-resource scenarios including non-standardized writing and dialectal complexity. Through an extensive community-driven initiative, volunteers contributed to the creation of over 36,000 translated sentences, marking a significant milestone in resource development. We evaluate machine translation capabilities through zero-shot approaches and fine-tuning experiments with pretrained machine translation models and provide a comprehensive analysis of limitations. Our findings reveal significant gaps in existing technologies for processing the selected languages, highlighting critical areas for improvement in language technology for Middle Eastern languages.