In the middle of our call, Ganesh Birua rotates his phone camera to show us a tree planted in front of the school. This is the only place in the village where he picks up the network. As soon as he has a free moment, this is where Ganesh spends most of his time, working tirelessly at his life’s work: popularizing the use of the Ho language, an indigenous language. , on the Internet.
When asked to tell his story, Ganesh Birua cannot hold back a smile. It all started in 2014. As part of a training in visual arts, he stayed in a youth hostel in Baripada, a town located about a hundred kilometers from Dighiabeda, his native village, in the state of Odisha. [dans l’est de l’Inde]. One day at the hostel, one of his friends mentions Facebook, arousing the young man’s curiosity. Because, in his village, no one has ever surfed the Internet. Ganesh therefore creates a Facebook profile and quickly joins the group “Ho Society of India”. This is where he discovers that the Ho, his tribe, have an alphabet, the “Warang Citi”. No one ever told him about it. Only problem: “Cannot find this alphabet on the Internet”, says, in Hindi, the young man of 23 years.
Avid student of languages
So he decides to take matters into his own hands. This son of peasants learns Warang Citi and creates a Facebook page on which he publishes the characters of the alphabet ho, as well as words, accompanied by their closest equivalents in odia [la langue officielle de l’Odisha] and in English.
In the early years, his work went relatively unnoticed. “Even though no one noticed what I was doing, I continued. says Ganesh. In 2018, he moved up a gear by creating other accounts on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, as well as a blog titled (“Let’s learn Warang Citi”).
His art studies are now behind him, but the passion he discovered at that time has not left him. While working in a photo studio in Baripada, he began to learn Bengali, Hindi and Santali, to be able to translate into all these languages the words he published in ho on social networks. Nothing else seems to interest him. When asked about his hobbies, he is unable to answer. But his work is starting to pay off.
A herculean task from scratch
In April 2021, a student from Silicon Valley contacts Ganesh on Facebook to ask his opinion on a braille alphabet he created for the Ho language. Shortly after, a Mexican-American designer sends him an image of a Coke can he’s dreamed up, with a ho logo on it. But his greatest reward came last November, when a certain Subhashish Panigrahi, from Bangalore, some 2,000 kilometers away, noticed his dictionary project.
Subhashish Panigrahi is a researcher in digital languages and has dedicated his career to promoting the digital development of endangered languages. When he discovered the “digital activism” of Ganesh Birua, he worked with a team of volunteers to create tools basic technologies in Santali and Ho (considered by Unesco as vulnerable languages).
The researcher knew full well that making the Ho language known on the Internet was a herculean task, hampered by several unavoidable logistical obstacles. Creating a spell checker, for example, requires a long list of words usually drawn from content published online. But as Subhashish Panigrahi found when he started mining data, “apart from another site, Ganesh Birua’s publications were the only real resources available for the Ho language”. The researcher still managed to publish a list of 5,000 words. From now on, “it’s up to the ho community to feed it gradually by publishing content”.
Start with the tool or with the users?
This winding path perfectly illustrates the difficulties that minority Indian languages face in making their way into the digital world. If, according to the last decennial census [effectué en 2011]no less than 19,500 languages are spoken in India [dont 121 sont parlées par 10 000 personnes ou plus], Hindi, Bengali and Telugu reign supreme on the Internet. according to
1 comment
Real yoddha