[Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

[Bishakha Datta]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20111130/2a3cda46/attachment.htm