The Indian state of Odisha publishes online dictionaries in 21 indigenous languages · Global Voices
Screenshot from the Odisha Virtual Academy Website.
In 2018, the government of the Indian state of Odisha published 21 dictionaries in the state's 21 provincial indigenous languages. The dictionaries were developed in collaboration with native-speaking communities for planned implementation in multilingual primary education programs. The trilingual dictionaries, with indigenous language translations into English and Odia (the official language of Odisha), have been uploaded in August 2019 for public use in an online education portal managed by the government.
On October 17, all the dictionaries were relicensed by online education portal Odisha Virtual Academy under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
We appreciate the efforts of @Saileshpat to have there repositories CC licence for greater and wider reach of these valuable resources.
— E&IT Department Odisha (@EIT_Odisha) October 17, 2019
<PERSON>, a volunteer Wikipedia editor from the Creative Commons and Wikimedia affiliated Odia Wikimedians User Group communities contributed largely in working closely with the government departments to make this happen. <PERSON> was also involved in the earlier efforts of migrating copyright to Creative Commons licenses for several social media accounts and websites run by the government.
Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution
Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution provides the basis of the use of a group of 22 Indian languages in governance, education and cultural promotion. It also provides guidelines for the public services examinations to be conducted in these scheduled languages. The languages in the current list are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Being listed in this list also helps the provinces to officially recognize those languages that are spoken locally for education and governance. There are requests to add 38 more languages to this list.
This is not the first time that the Odisha government has allowed its online resources to be shared under a free Creative Commons license. In 2017, the Odisha government made headlines as the first Indian state government to relicense eight of its social media under a free license. This allowed for the use of content to be used on openly-licensed platforms like Wikipedia and its other sister projects like Wikimedia Commons (multimedia library), Wikisource (online free library) and Wiktionary (online free dictionary). 607
Eventually, <PERSON>, a Wikimedian from OWUG created a tool to easily migrate openly-licensed images from relicensed social media handles to Wikimedia Commons so that the images can be used on Wikipedia.
<PERSON> from Rising Voices interviewed <PERSON> who heads the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Development, Minorities and Backward Classes Welfare Department of the Odisha government to learn about this project.
To provide some background to the development of the dictionaries, <PERSON> shared how the need for the bilingual indigenous-language dictionaries to provide multilingual education was the driving force behind this work. As there are 21 distinct indigenous languages that are spoken in the state and grassroots-level workers required trilingual proficiency, they faced immense obstacles because of the lack of such resources. Some of key organizations that were involved in the compilation were the Academy of Tribal Languages and Culture (ATLC), Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute (SCSTRTI) and Special Development Councils (SDC) — all government entities of the state. The Museum of Tribal Art and Artifact in Odisha's capital city, Bhubaneswar, remains a resource center for visitors to learn about the indigenous peoples in Odisha and their languages and cultures.
Rising Voices (RV): Many of the languages are not well documented. How did you collaborate with the speaker communities to collect and compile the words? How did existing dictionaries help in this process?
Ranjana Chopra (RC): It is a fact that the indigenous languages have not been properly documented in the [Odisha] state although some sporadic attempts have been made over the years. Indigenous languages are full of dialectical variations. However, despite the variations, there are ‘nucleus’ areas where the “core language” is referred/spoken, although with some mixtures. While preparing bilingual dictionaries and trilingual proficiency modules, resource persons from the various nucleus areas were invited to work on the texts with a well-organized non-overlapping time plan. The ‘nucleus’ area and the relevant resource persons were identified through conducting workshops in respective language localities.
RV: Some of the languages, like Bonda (Remosam), are spoken by as little as 8,000 people. Half of the Bonda community live in remote villages. 607