Hoi,During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read
the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
Thanks,
GerardM