Ever wondered if you could speak in Ladakhi and Mao Naga? The Indic Language application that is being developed by a few enthusiastic students from the Delhi University’s Cluster Innovation Centre will allow you to do so. It is being put together by a group of four undergraduate students including Himanshu Patel, Vivek Shekhar, Leelambar Soren and is lead by Vikalp Kumar.
Vikalp Kumar, 21, developed a liking for languages when he was able to impress his friends by writing their names in different languages. He is basically from Chennai and knows 5 more languages than the usual suspects Tamil, English and Hindi. The other languages that he is proficient in are Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Punjabi and Sarazi –which is spoken in a district of Kashmir. He has an understanding of Sanskrit and Persian as well.
Under the guidance of Sukrita Paul Kumar, Coordinator of BTech in Humanities in DU, the group started by doing spadework and followed it up with a questionnaire. It took half a year for them to accomplish this preparatory work. Sukrita, who was an editor for People's Linguistic Survey of India knew just how big an undertaking this project was. Though this sort of exercise would claim generous funding and involves daunting field visits, the team found ways around both.
Vikalp said that,"There are speakers of 80 northeastern languages in Delhi." The questionnaire which contains over 2,600 English word and phrases in English is circulated among native speakers of a language to find the closest equivalents for it.
In September 2013, in what Vikas calls as "rapid vocabulary collection workshop" in about four hours, 2,500 words in Ladakhi were collected and recorded. Speakers of Dhatki, from Sindh region of Pakistan were traced at the South Asian University in Delhi and they took part in the exercise.
Facebook helped Vikalp cross borders and he contacted a speaker of Khowar through the social network. Email, instant messenger and Whatsapp were also put to use to collect words.
The app is not just another online dictionary. It is having songs, subtitled videos and indicates the geographical spread of a given language. Patel and Shekar worked on geography, culture and politics part of the project and tech team comprised of Patel and Soren. Kumar took the overall responsibility.
Kumar said, "We can go public when we have about five languages." Sukrita is also considering letting future batches of students pick up where the current batch leaves off, enhancing the number of languages in the app.
सिलिकॉन इंडिया से साभार
Vikalp Kumar, 21, developed a liking for languages when he was able to impress his friends by writing their names in different languages. He is basically from Chennai and knows 5 more languages than the usual suspects Tamil, English and Hindi. The other languages that he is proficient in are Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Punjabi and Sarazi –which is spoken in a district of Kashmir. He has an understanding of Sanskrit and Persian as well.
Under the guidance of Sukrita Paul Kumar, Coordinator of BTech in Humanities in DU, the group started by doing spadework and followed it up with a questionnaire. It took half a year for them to accomplish this preparatory work. Sukrita, who was an editor for People's Linguistic Survey of India knew just how big an undertaking this project was. Though this sort of exercise would claim generous funding and involves daunting field visits, the team found ways around both.
Vikalp said that,"There are speakers of 80 northeastern languages in Delhi." The questionnaire which contains over 2,600 English word and phrases in English is circulated among native speakers of a language to find the closest equivalents for it.
In September 2013, in what Vikas calls as "rapid vocabulary collection workshop" in about four hours, 2,500 words in Ladakhi were collected and recorded. Speakers of Dhatki, from Sindh region of Pakistan were traced at the South Asian University in Delhi and they took part in the exercise.
Facebook helped Vikalp cross borders and he contacted a speaker of Khowar through the social network. Email, instant messenger and Whatsapp were also put to use to collect words.
The app is not just another online dictionary. It is having songs, subtitled videos and indicates the geographical spread of a given language. Patel and Shekar worked on geography, culture and politics part of the project and tech team comprised of Patel and Soren. Kumar took the overall responsibility.
Kumar said, "We can go public when we have about five languages." Sukrita is also considering letting future batches of students pick up where the current batch leaves off, enhancing the number of languages in the app.
सिलिकॉन इंडिया से साभार
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