[Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

[Shiju Alex]

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.
>


Yes. that is true.  I do not forsee such a thing happening for Indic wikis.
:)


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.



Shiju









On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of
>> Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The
>> combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me
>> talking with many people. Given the structure of the Indic scripts, it is
>> possible for me to learn to read the text; it will get me as far as
>> pronouncing something I do not know the meaning of. For native speakers it
>> must be not that hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning
>> to read and write English already.
>>
>
> Dear Gerard,
>
> I am intrigued by this, yet struggling to understand what you mean here.
>
> Do you mean that many educated people can speak their own language, but
> not read or write it? (because they communicate in English instead). If so,
> that is probably true - but is that what you mean?
>
> For example, my mother tongue is Bengali - I speak it much more than I
> read or write it (even though I can read and write in Bengali), since I
> usually read and write in English. However, there are many people in India
> who have the opposite experience eg who not just speak, but also read and
> write in indic languages.
>
> Cheers
> Bishakha
>
>
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