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Work plan July 2015 - June 2016

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Santali is an Indian indigenous language in the Munda subfamily of Austroasiatic languages. Around 6.2 million living in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal speak Santali. Majority of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Tripura, and West Bengal. [1] Santali is written in Ol Chiki, Roman and Devanagari script where in India “Ol Chiki” is preferred over the other two by the language activism/research groups from Jharkhand and Odisha. [2]

About the Project

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Santali Wikipedia is in incubation since September 2010. Currently Roman script is used as there is only free licensed Ol Chiki font available. There are totally 31 articles contributed by 20 editors over time. [3] This project aims to make Santali Wikipedia into a live project. Towards this CIS-A2K will undertake two major activities. First, it will address the technical challenges in using Ol chiki script and will work towards bringing out a free licensed Ol Chiki Unicode font. Second, it will cultivate a small group of about 10 new Santali speakers as editors who could contribute regularly to the Santali Wikipedia Incubator project. The project will be based at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) which is home to about 20,000 tribal students out of which about 1,000 students speak Santali as a native language.

Work done so far

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  • Preliminary research about available fonts, input methods, and language resources.
  • A freely licensed prototype font designed with source code made available publicly. [4]
  • A review meeting plan in progress to review the font designed, arrive on a consensus about the form and getting the community feedback to finalize the font.

Challenges

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  • Native speakers of Santali (students at KISS for this project) are conversant but do not have formal reading and writing skills in Santali.[5]
  • KISS library currently neither has any book written in Ol Chiki script nor the institution has much scope for Santali learning. So the native speakers do not have enough resources for language study or knowledge of the language.
  • Santali Wikipedia incubation project has articles in only Roman script. None of the current operating systems have native Ol Chiki input support.
  • Though there are few fonts created by the Wesantals project there is hardly any free licensed Unicode font (except Google’s Noto Ol Chiki). The font(s) released by C-DAC is not freely licensed. So, there are difficulties for webfont support. [6]

Implementation Plan

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Development of Free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font

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Plan:
To facilitate a project for developing a free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font.

Execution:

  1. Facilitating development of an OFL Ol Chiki font.
  2. Testing of the font by native speakers and getting bugs fixed.
  3. Liaison with Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team for webfont support.

Projection:

  1. One free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font to be made available.
  2. Making available one freely licensed Ol Chiki Webfont on ULS.

Reviving Santali Wikipedia incubator project

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Plan:
To cultivate a community of enthusiastic Santali Wikipedia editors at KISS.

Execution:

  1. Creating a group of faculty and students to contribute to Santali Wikipedia.
  2. Organize training workshops. One per month.
  3. Finding educational resources in Santali.
  4. Regular mentoring and support.

Projection:

  1. Santali Wikipedia training to about 50 Santali students of which 10-15 could turn into active contributors.
  2. To result in 100 new articles on Santali Wikipedia.

Budget

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Expenditure Item FDC Support (INR) FDC Support (US$) Other Sources and in kind Support (INR) Other Sources and in kind Support (US$)
1 PO x 10% * 82,560/- 1,335.89 - -
Travel and Stay ** - - 100,000/- 1,618.08
Research and typeface design 100,000/- 1,618.08 100,000/- 1,618.08
Volunteer Support 25,000/- 404.52 25,000/- 404.52
Events/Meetups/Workshops 20,000/- 323.62 50,000/- 809.04
Consumables/Printing/Stationery/Swag 20,000/- 323.62 - -
Total 247,560/- 4,005.72 275,000/- 4,449.72

* 10% of Subhashish Panigrahi's time as Program Officer, who will anchor this plan at CIS-A2K
** Expenses incurred by the CIS-A2K program team towards executing the plan.

Endorsements

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Notes

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  1. ↑ "Santali: A Language of India". Ethnologue: Languages of the World. SIL International. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  2. ↑ Santhalis bask in language festivities - 1st anniversary of inclusion in 8th Schedule. The Telegraph (23 December 2004)
  3. ↑ Analysis of editor activity of Santali Wikipedia incubator
  4. ↑ Source code of the Ol Chiki font project
  5. ↑ Indigenous Languages Rising: Digital Activism, Research and Training
  6. ↑ Meijssen, Gerard. “The #Santali language and the Ol Chiki script II”.
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