Ravi shankar said:
If your ambition is to teach the mother tongues for the convent educated
minority English speaking Indians through a Wiki project and then make
them contribute in Indic language Wikipedias, it may never happen. I am
not even sure if it fits inside Wikipedia's mission.
Is Gerard is trying to convey the idea of Mother Language illiteracy? Remember by illiteracy of a language, we mean the inability to read or write (rather than speaking) that specific language. I must say Mother Language illiteracy is rising in Indian cities and in some states (for example, Kerala).
In fact if you go through the discussions that I am sharing with you (about different language wiki communities), many Indic language wikipedians are also raising the same concern.
I guess my point is to distinguish between illiteracy and non-use or low use (in reading and writing), which is more my personal situ on Bengali, Hindi, Marathi.
So I feel like there may be three or more categories of persons for each language:
-Speakers who read and write in that lang
-Speakers who don't read and write in that lang (non or low users)
-Speakers who don't know how to read and write in that lang (illiterate, although I don't like the word)
And agree with Ravi that it would be hard to get both those who are not literate in a language or low users of it to contribute in that language. For example, I would be reluctant to contribute in the languages I speak, but don't write or read in everyday, even though I am technically literate in them.
Cheers
Bishakha