In different parts of India, there have been focused efforts at rejuvenating and documenting three different languages that only a handful of the country’s 1.4 billion people speak – Raji, Angika and Gisari.
And at the heart of these efforts is one New York-based not-for-profit organisation, WikiTongues, which aims to document and aid the revitalisation of local languages worldwide.
“Language, really, is the vehicle of culture. When you start remembering your community’s language, you are also going to start remembering the other things that the community used to do before they were forced to give up their language,” Daniel Bögre Udell, executive director and co-founder of WikiTongues, tells ThePrint.
Udell adds that such forced language endangerment “usually results from economic exclusion, political exclusion, violence and colonisation. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a natural or inevitable result to something like globalisation.”
WikiTongues started with language documentation in 2014 by crowdsourcing videos from people speaking local languages from their community. While the effort to build a language repository through crowdsourcing is still underway, the organisation has received 300 videos in three months from people across the globe. In 2021, WikiTongues also forayed into the rejuvenation of endangered languages.
Since then, the non-profit annually handpicks a cohort of people to work with, offering them grants, training and support to identify their community’s short-term and long-term language needs. They also develop implementation plans and ensure that the participants can meet their needs even after the year-long project with WikiTongues is over.
“Language revitalisation is a generational process that takes a very long time,” says Udell, who will speak about WikiTongues at the TedXGateway event in Mumbai this Sunday.
It is effectively a process of the community reversing language endangerment for themselves, Udell adds. “The process of ensuring that your language is sufficiently preserved so that it can be learnt. It is a process of teaching adults to be fluent speakers. It is the process of raising children as new native speakers. It is the process of creating [a] kind of contemporary or modern context to use the language on a daily basis.”
Also read: Official language treats Indians as Lallu of Hum Log. Hindi Diwas won’t address that issue
From Raji to Chocktaw to Dogon
After completing this year’s cohort, Wikitongues would have concluded 40 language revitalisation projects, each meeting a different community and language need.
In India, Wikitongues worked on a project for the Raji language last year, led by their cohort, Tulsi Rajbaar. The language was spoken by traditionally nomadic communities of Uttarakhand that once resided in caves across the mountains and up to the lower Kumaon belt. According to the organisation, by 2019, there were 889 speakers of the Raji language, most of which were above 50.
“Tulsi Rajbaar was focusing on mother tongue education for children. Over 12 months, she organised a series of pop-up language classes, created an alphabet reader for the languages and also started training other adults to be teachers,” Udell says.
WikiTongues has also worked on rejuvenating the Angika and Gisari languages from India.
“The Angika project is super cool; Amrit Sufi, who is running the project, is doing a lot of work getting the Angika language online, creating contemporary resources in the language, the most notable example of which is the Angika language Wikipedia,” says Udell while speaking about the language that is spoken in Bihar, Jharkhand and parts of Nepal by about seven lakh people.
“The Gisari language project is all interesting because Gisari is a language that hasn’t been fully classified, so it doesn’t have an ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] code. There is some linguistic literature that incorrectly refers to it as a dialect of Gujarati,” says Udell, adding that an ISO code is important to get your language fully digitised.
Wikitongues’ projects have taken a lot of different forms outside of India, too. For instance, this year, Udell says his organisation is working with a computer scientist on reviving Chocktaw, an indigenous language of the United States. The scientist is also doing some groundwork to see if her language can be used as a medium of communication in artificial intelligence.
Udell also points out how one doesn’t need to be a fluent speaker of the language to take the initiative to revitalise it. He gave the example of a project they’re running in border villages of the US and Mexico, which now only have about two dozen fluent speakers of the local language.
“The person who started that revitalisation project was not a fluent speaker. Her aunt was a speaker. But, she was very passionate to keep the language alive, so in her case, we said we need to organise what linguistic documentation we have and start getting adults under 50 together to start learning the language. Eventually, one day, the next step would be to teach the language to children. Try and raise new native speakers,” says Udell, emphasising the need to belong to a community in order to revitalise its endangered language.
Also read: Phase out English intelligently. But prepare Indian languages for the difficult task first
Mounting the challenges
Udell says a major stumbling block in revitalising a language today is the lack of good internet connectivity. Wikitongues especially faced this in a revitalisation project from the 2022 cohort in Mali in West Africa, where the organisation was aiding the rejuvenation of one of the more endangered varieties of the native Dogon language. The absence of good internet access made it harder for the researcher on the ground to archive, transcribe and translate his material.
Multiple dialects and different scripts can also throw up some challenges.
“Dialectal diversity is the natural state of any language, some more than others, though. It sometimes causes problems in a community when they are trying to revitalise their language if they can’t agree on which dialect will be the standardised version. There are different solutions to that,” Udell says.
For example, one can create a new standardised dialect based on an existing dialect, or borrow from others. Another solution, Udell adds, could be to have different standardisations for different dialects.
Language scripts not widely supported by technology could acceleate language extinction too. If one’s language cannot be used on modern devices, there is an automatic shift to one that can be. “That can subconsciously create the idea that your language is no longer useful,” Udell says.
But the biggest challenge is the sheer generational timescale that any language revitalisation process requires.
“It takes a very long time, and it can be difficult to keep up with it for a 30,40,50-year period,” he says. Of the projects WikiTongues has finished working with, about 80 per cent are still active, and that’s wonderful, Udell adds.
“But will they still be active in 50 years? One can only hope so.”
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)