The word for
sunlight or sunshine in Angami — a language spoken by around 130,000 people in
the North East — is niakikezie . In the Ao-language of Nagaland, it
is anüpu oranüsangwa . And this reporter in far away Bengaluru could
look up these words and many more from several Indian languages, thanks to
digital dictionaries available on the Bharatavani website.
Most cities in India
have infrastructure to teach many foreign languages . But how many look inwards
to tap the domestic cultural motherlode of more than 1,500 Indian languages? It
is this question that spurred Bharatavani, an online Indian Languages platform
hosted by the Central Institute for Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysuru, to not
only publish content in 121 Indian languages, but work towards starting online
classes.
Searchable
resource
What is
particularly causing ripples of excitement among linguists and researchers is
the compilation of digitised searchable dictionaries. In a little over a year
since its inception, the portal offers 262 unilingual and multilingual
dictionaries in 50 Indian languages — all of them in a searchable format on
android platforms — which can be accessed on Bharatavani’s free Android app.
The number of
languages covered will soon cross a hundred, said Beluru Sudarshana, consultant
with CIIL. “Bharatavani is not publishing new works, but we are for the first
time digitising available dictionaries in smaller languages, to bring it to a
wider audience,” he said. Malto-English-Hindi, Odia-Ho, English-Ao and
Lepcha-English are some of the dictionaries on offer — most of them available
in a searchable format and not as cumbersome PDF files.
Prof. Panchanan
Mohanty, Dean, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad and an expert in
Eastern Language research, who is also on the Bharatavani committee, likened
Bharatavani to Project Tiger, arguing for conservation of India’s
fast-depleting language heritage. But more significantly, the digitised
database of dictionaries is a goldmine for linguistic research in the country,
he said.
Larger
database
These
dictionaries can now be linked to create a large database of words across
various languages, using English, Hindi or regional languages as the source
words. With over seven lakh source words at present, the potential of the
database is immense. For instance, the use of Odia source words will result in
an Odia-English-Ho-Munda-Khadia-Kui-Oraon-Saura dictionary, integrating a
family of Austroasiatic languages spoken in central-eastern India. The
integration of these dictionaries is still a work in progress.
Linguist G.N.
Devy, who spearheaded the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, believes this
resource will help speed up socio-linguistic research and not just along themes
of structure and genealogy, thereby ensuring better development planning.
“One serious
challenge is that children from communities speaking non-scheduled languages
are pushed out of schools leading to development deprivation. For an
imaginative user, content on Bharatavani may help in designing a curriculum in
these languages,” he said, adding that starting from scheduled languages,
Bharatavani has now broadened its scope to smaller languages that have over
10,000 speakers.
Source: THE HINDU-3rd December,2017
