With the Bengali Wikipedia growing steadily,little known languages spoken in pockets of West Bengal and eastern India are now finding a platform on the portal. So, now one can read articles in Wikipedia in Angika, Gurung, Santhali and Tamang languages. What started as a free encyclopedia in English, on January 15, 2001 is now available in 270 languages. The aim is to revive languages that are slowly dying because few speak in these tongues.

BENGAL SPEAKS

How many of us knew that there is a language called Angika spoken in parts of Malda besides parts of Jharkhand, Bihar and Nepal? It’s an ancient language from the era when Anga, Banga and Kalinga were neighbouring states in the eastern part of the country. About 7.5 lakh people speak Angika language but it would be tough to find anyone outside the region who can speak or read the language. In a few months from now, one may be able to read articles in the language on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and the world’s fifth largest website.“Earlier, Angika had its own script, but now that script is lost. So it’s written in Devnagari,” said Kundan Amitabh, a Bangalore- based IT professional who has been composing articles in the language since 1979 and since 2003 on computers.

The Angika language Wikipedia started being developed two years ago. “Now it’s in incubation, which means it’s a little short of a full-fledged launch, when one can even get the instructions in the same language,” Amitabh said. It’s not only dying tongues that have found space on Wikipedia, the Bengali version of the portal is also doing well. “Bengali Wikipedia already has about 21,000 articles and we expect the figure to it increase regularly as more and more people are coming ahead to contribute articles or updating the existing ones,” said Jayanta Nath, one of the administrators the Bengali Wikipedia. Significantly, use of Indian languages in increasing. “This is definitely a sign of success ,” said Bishakha Datta, a Wikimedia Foundation member.

In India, one can already read in 20 different languages while 20 other littlespoken languages are in incubation, that is awaiting a full-fledged launch. Bishnupriya- Manipuri is one of the languages that has made it to Wikipedia. Spoken by about 4,50,000 people based in Assam and Tripura in the Northeast and neighbouring Bangladesh and Myanmar, it is rarely found in written form. But Wikipedia already boasts more than 25,000 articles in the language. One may also get to read get Wikipedia articles in Bodo, Villi, Awadhi,Kumaoni and Maithili.

WORLD CLASS

In Africa, Wikipedia has taken up a challenging task. While uploading articles on Wikipedia needs to fulfil one criterion — citation from published texts — most of the indigenous African languages do not even have a recognisable publishing industry. Most of these languages are oral, have few or no published texts and yet some of these languages have found their own Wikipedia. So far, there is Wikipedia in all 10 official languages of South Africa and Arabic, Hebrew, African and Swahili are some African languages whose Wikipedias are considered strong enough, even comparing to other big languages across the world, and already has thousands of articles. Upper Sorbian, with a speaking population of 40,000 based mostly in Germany or Sranantongo, spoken by a population of about 1,20, 000 based in The Netherlands or North Frisian,spoken by 10,000 people in Sleswig-Holstein in Europe.

EXPERT OPINION

“Education in the mother tongue is always a virtue. Though Wikipedia cannot offer formal education and sometimes the contents provided are not completely trustworthy, the initiative to boost the site in more and more local languages is surely an initiative that needs to be applauded,” said educationist Pabitra Sarkar.

Copyrights : The Hindustan Times : “Living to tell the tale” by Snigdhendu Bhattacharya , appeared in” The Hindustan Times” newspaper , Kolkata Edition on 22 Jan 2011