Thursday 24 November 2011

Even Hindi falls behind

In Wikipedia woos India with local languages , The Hindustan times reports on WikiConference India 2011.

Though the article only mentions major Indian languages, rather than any of the 197 languages of India listed in the Unesco Atlas, I thought that the following paragraph was notable in the scope of this blog.

Wales said that the Indian page editors have experienced technical complications due to the lack of digital archiving and difficulty in accessing keyboards enabled with regional script. “The number of Indian language pages on Wikipedia is very small compared to the number of people who speak the language,” said Wales. “Globally, there are more than 35,000 Wikipedians, who make at least five edits on the English page everyday. However, in terms of numbers, the Hindi page is far behind with barely 50 Wikipedians making five edits daily,” he added.

In Wikipedia, we have a major international and multilingual resource; but even Hindi, with 180 Million speakers falls way behind English, due to differences in internet penetration and a Latin bias in computer hardware.

Friday 18 November 2011

BBC and Independent report on Andaman dictionary

In First Andaman dictionary a 'linguistic treasure trove', Alastair Lawson reports on Prof. Anvita Abbi's  forthcoming Multilingual Dictionary of Great Andamanese, containing content from Bo, Khora, Jeru, and Sare.

The article emphasises the age of the Andamanese culture and languages.  There is also a short piece of audio content, playing some Andamanese words and phrases, alongside their English equivalents

In Breathing Life into a Dying Language , The Independent also reports on the same story.  It's emphasis is on the death last year of Boa Sr, the last speaker of Bo.