like Grandma stories I think we all grew
up with our grandma stories with both
parents working I personally grew up
with me listening to my grandma’s
stories and her songs and they were so
enchanting
they were beautiful because every single
story that she would tell me were
handcrafted by her when I grew up I
never realized that those stories those
songs would never recorded in a digital
form and this was around 2014-2015 when
I was home for a longer time and I
started recording well I thought of
recording them but I couldn’t agree we
we couldn’t have a mutual agreement
about recording them because she told me
I can’t just tell you a story like that
because it’s very some spontaneous a
couple of days of negotiations when and
finally we agreed
she started with kind of a boring story
and then things picked up and she tell
me about ten stories ten twelve stories
and I recorded all of them individually
one after the other and sure she’ll also
should also sing me a song I’m gonna
play that for you
[Music]
[Music]
that particular song is called bhajana
and every every single neighborhood
every single village has had their own
versions of that and those were morning
songs so when the bride would leave
their parents place and to the in-laws
she would sing this song and there were
months of preparations going on to teach
the bride to learn that song because she
has to sing and cry at the same time and
it wasn’t easy in the beginning so it
was full of sadness and a lot of
emotional content in the beginning but
over time women like my grandma who were
teaching these Brides how to sing and
cry at the same time started adding a
lot of humor into the songs so
eventually the songs the content of the
song became more wider they were a lot
of social aspects in them there were a
lot of humor in them and people started
enjoying them a lot but but very
interestingly the media the movies did
not capture this essence which were
widely spread you know a language spoken
and an our language by the way was not
an indigenous language it was a widely
spoken language rather a variation of a
widely spoken language and I begin to
imagine what could have happened to the
languages that are not officially
recognized by the government languages
that are not taught in the schools
languages that are not used for
scientific research and so on let’s
classify them as marginalized languages
Oh in between something very interesting
happened when I was a small kid I grew
up in a neighborhood well I grew up in a
small town they had about 30% of people
speaking various indigenous languages
and one of them one of those communities
were called noncardiac those communities
were very interesting because they
literally used to jump from branch to
branch to catch to hunt monkeys because
their staple food was monkey over the
time they got assimilated with the
mainstream society they started learning
our language and and in the process of
that they lost their own language nobody
ever bothered to record their language
that’s the that’s the kind of home
that’s their Hut that they live the
living and there that’s just one
community but imagine in this country
there are there are like hundreds and
thousands of communities like these
they’re had their own unique culture
they had their own unique language which
is literally the tool to preserve that
culture to to contain that culture to
have their indigenous knowledge inside
that UNESCO has identified that the
world has about 7,000 languages roughly
half of them are dying over the time and
I have highlighted that portion which
says countries with greatest linguistic
diversity are typically the ones with
most endangered languages that means
countries like India Papua New Guinea
are more dangerous regions for languages
to grow and in our country in India we
have about seven hundred and eighty
languages out of them
240 250 languages have died in the last
50 years and 197 have been identified by
UNESCO as endangered languages that
means these languages are literally in
risk if we do if we do not do anything
today those languages are gonna die and
they’ll lose their indigenous culture
and everything that’s embedded in those
languages languages are tools for
communications and that’s the basic
purpose of any language right when we
lose languages will lose the indigenous
culture the indeed the the the Kuzon of
making various dishes
the default lore the stories the songs
the traditional games and so on and we
have lost far many languages in the in
the past we don’t wanna do that again it
has been found out in the research that
kids that grow up in multilingual
environment are more sensible they
understand perspectives more than other
kids and that’s the biggest advantage of
a lot of people that are there are there
are polyglots or multilingual it sort of
know how many here in the audience speak
more than six languages or at least six
languages anyone okay
you’re my hero five languages yeah okay
there’s Sam four three two one all right
I don’t read Italy my friend and this is
this is the beginning of that generation
of that era where people are becoming
more monolingual and that’s the problem
because kids are gonna think in one
language because I’m gonna imagine and
dream in only one language and I think
about myself when I dream I actually
dream in a couple of languages depending
on the situation I dream in couple of
languages and that that’s not gonna
happen to those kids that are growing in
this era because when I step out of my
house
I I found I find kids from different
families they definitely look different
but they speak one language called
English I got a small break between two
jobs and I was thinking how could I do
something what I am passionate about and
my passion being languages I thought I
will do something about endangered
languages or marginalized languages
because that’s something that’s
literally you know not no one is doing
anything about it so I dig dig a little
deeper
to find out the projects that are
supporting endangered languages and I
found a lot of projects actually what
really mesmerized me is that a lot of
people have gone to indigenous language
speakers communities there are remotely
best in different part of the world and
they have managed to record those
languages it wasn’t a easy job because
it’s very difficult to establish
relationship with communities and I
personally first that kind of problem
when I was recording a language called
car B car B is spoken by about four
hundred and ninety thousand people in
Assam and neighboring states in India
and it’s a typical urban language by the
way it has relationship with you know
languages like Burmese money Puri and so
on and this this person who I spoke to
was actually a quite fraud is actually a
quite prominent person in the community
he’s really respected in the community
his written books has done a lot of
research about their language but where
I found very interesting is there was no
digital documentation there was no audio
visual documentation of their language
so when I spoke to her spoke to him I
asked can you sing a song for me a
traditional
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
so something like this I’m so sorry
about it actually I love all this folk
ballads and every yeah I think I do
so that song was beautiful isn’t it he
told me that he can’t sing in the
beginning and over the time between this
negotiation that you kind of heard he
actually managed to sing that song and
that’s a love ballad in their language
and and this this is this this really
saddened me that people have not been
able to understand what what is required
for their language and when I look at
these projects I founded a lot of
resources but I couldn’t find much
resource about how to digitize how to
digitize these languages how digitally
document these languages and I realized
that a lot of people out there like me
would be sourcing for the same very
thing resources to understand the
process because my background is not
linguistics I started engineering and so
I start working on gathering resources
and that kind of shape into this project
called open speaks which is an open and
collaborative project and a community
that has resources in four major
categories first is open methodology the
basics of why digital documentation is
required for languages so it goes about
talking about how you can establish
connection with communities like I’d
like the experiment that I did and so on
the second is open educational resources
these are openly licensed educational
resources that talk about technicalities
the software the hardware how to what
kind of file format you need to save the
content and so on the third is open
source software
a Tamil Wikipedian with a friend created
a software to create spoken dictionary
and I can have forked that on github and
I created a version of my own and I name
it as kitab eden which is part of this
project and that helps record a long
list of words or phrases or sentences
that’s that’s really needed when you’re
creating something like a text-to-speech
and so on so that’s part of that and the
fourth thing is the open datasets so
when you record and you have a file you
have to upload that somewhere you’ll
you’ll normally upload it just with a
name but that’s not enough the Internet
is so huge we need a lot of additional
information especially for a lot of
people indigenous language content are
literally alien languages they won’t
they won’t be able to discover that in
the first place if you just upload that
with a file name there is a need to add
a lot of information translation of the
summary of the content subtitle for
videos and audios and other information
that we call collectively as metadata so
metadata is very important and open
datasets take care of that something
really interesting happened a couple of
months back and I was talking to
National Geographic and they agreed to
support part of the project so so I grew
a small community around this project
and there are about five people right
now some of them actually speak the
indigenous languages and we’re going to
work with two endangered languages from
Orissa called Banda and GABA or good Bo
those two languages are spoken about
spoken by about 8,000 people roughly but
the number is is kind of you know it’s a
statistic so it’s statistics from a
couple of years back the problem with
those two communities is they are
located in such places which are
geopolitically very sensitive and it’s
really difficult for them for many
things in life things are not accessible
in the first place basic amenities are
not accessible and we’re talking about
internet and digital documentation
and so on education does not exist in
its basic form in many places like that
so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna
use these people in our forefront and I
call them citizen archivists they’re
gonna learn from all these resources
available on the website and they’re
gonna translate some of the content
because the content is right now in all
English so the translated content is
gonna help them to learn how did we
detail digitally document languages and
they’re gonna go to those villages talk
to people interview them and record
those interviews sit with them create
translations and metadata that I talked
about and then come back and then we
will upload all those content online
publicly available for everyone under
open licenses I’m going to talk about
open licenses in a little later and a
that’s thus kind of a far dream to have
indigenous language native speakers
interviewing their fellow community
members and that’s a picture from Mexico
a friend of mine who picked that picture
is working with a lot of indigenous
language communities his name is Eddie
Avila and he actually wrote a beautiful
beautiful presentation a couple of
months back and there’s a link over
there he worked with these communities
and help them create Wikipedia projects
for their own languages so as you know
Wikipedia exists in about 300 languages
in the entire world and it’s expanding
but the scope of Wikipedia at this
moment for indigenous languages is
really less so many communities in Latin
America are now gathering there they’re
doing a lot of workshops like the one
over there and they’re learning how to
type in their own languages they’re
learning how to translate content that
exists in different forms and create
Wikipedia articles on in their own
languages so when you create resources
that help communities like that a lot I
want to leave you all with four thoughts
the first one
be eager grab your smartphone or
whatever gadget you have when you hear a
language that is not widely spoken so
you know about the widely spoken
languages we have about 22 languages in
the 8 schedule of India how about the
other languages I talked about 780
languages in the in our country so all
those languages all those 750 plus
languages that are not widely spoken if
you hear any of them then try to record
them that’s number one number two
publish them in an open in an open and
public platform something like YouTube
or SoundCloud or Vimeo or even Wikimedia
Commons which is a sister project of
Wikipedia and is and it’s a it’s an open
project it’s an open and collaborative
platform for anyone to open to upload
content under a free license I’m going
to talk about free license right now and
that’s number three I personally
recommend to use a license called
Creative Commons because by default
everything is copyrighted and everything
is copyrighted by the original author
when you upload that and on a platform
people won’t be able to make use of that
people won’t be able to make copy or
copy of that and your we’re talking
about the indigenous language
communities and they’re their languages
and their content which are otherwise
literally hidden out out there somewhere
people are not going to discover those
that content unless you make them
available under an open license so open
licensing is quite a huge topic I’m not
going to talk about that but Creative
Commons license particularly allows you
allows anyone to make use of your
content to make drive –’tis to make
copies and then and even make commercial
use of that copy and that’s the beauty
of it because you’re allowing people to
use your work and use that for research
and so on and the last one is the most
important one and I talked about that a
little bit before the metadata when
you’re adding information when you’re
adding a lot of information in your
content you’re transcribing when you’re
creating subtitles for the videos and
audios that’s how people are gonna read
a read about those content learn about
so thank you so much for allowing me to
speak to you and thank you the
organizers
[Applause]
up with our grandma stories with both
parents working I personally grew up
with me listening to my grandma’s
stories and her songs and they were so
enchanting
they were beautiful because every single
story that she would tell me were
handcrafted by her when I grew up I
never realized that those stories those
songs would never recorded in a digital
form and this was around 2014-2015 when
I was home for a longer time and I
started recording well I thought of
recording them but I couldn’t agree we
we couldn’t have a mutual agreement
about recording them because she told me
I can’t just tell you a story like that
because it’s very some spontaneous a
couple of days of negotiations when and
finally we agreed
she started with kind of a boring story
and then things picked up and she tell
me about ten stories ten twelve stories
and I recorded all of them individually
one after the other and sure she’ll also
should also sing me a song I’m gonna
play that for you
[Music]
[Music]
that particular song is called bhajana
and every every single neighborhood
every single village has had their own
versions of that and those were morning
songs so when the bride would leave
their parents place and to the in-laws
she would sing this song and there were
months of preparations going on to teach
the bride to learn that song because she
has to sing and cry at the same time and
it wasn’t easy in the beginning so it
was full of sadness and a lot of
emotional content in the beginning but
over time women like my grandma who were
teaching these Brides how to sing and
cry at the same time started adding a
lot of humor into the songs so
eventually the songs the content of the
song became more wider they were a lot
of social aspects in them there were a
lot of humor in them and people started
enjoying them a lot but but very
interestingly the media the movies did
not capture this essence which were
widely spread you know a language spoken
and an our language by the way was not
an indigenous language it was a widely
spoken language rather a variation of a
widely spoken language and I begin to
imagine what could have happened to the
languages that are not officially
recognized by the government languages
that are not taught in the schools
languages that are not used for
scientific research and so on let’s
classify them as marginalized languages
Oh in between something very interesting
happened when I was a small kid I grew
up in a neighborhood well I grew up in a
small town they had about 30% of people
speaking various indigenous languages
and one of them one of those communities
were called noncardiac those communities
were very interesting because they
literally used to jump from branch to
branch to catch to hunt monkeys because
their staple food was monkey over the
time they got assimilated with the
mainstream society they started learning
our language and and in the process of
that they lost their own language nobody
ever bothered to record their language
that’s the that’s the kind of home
that’s their Hut that they live the
living and there that’s just one
community but imagine in this country
there are there are like hundreds and
thousands of communities like these
they’re had their own unique culture
they had their own unique language which
is literally the tool to preserve that
culture to to contain that culture to
have their indigenous knowledge inside
that UNESCO has identified that the
world has about 7,000 languages roughly
half of them are dying over the time and
I have highlighted that portion which
says countries with greatest linguistic
diversity are typically the ones with
most endangered languages that means
countries like India Papua New Guinea
are more dangerous regions for languages
to grow and in our country in India we
have about seven hundred and eighty
languages out of them
240 250 languages have died in the last
50 years and 197 have been identified by
UNESCO as endangered languages that
means these languages are literally in
risk if we do if we do not do anything
today those languages are gonna die and
they’ll lose their indigenous culture
and everything that’s embedded in those
languages languages are tools for
communications and that’s the basic
purpose of any language right when we
lose languages will lose the indigenous
culture the indeed the the the Kuzon of
making various dishes
the default lore the stories the songs
the traditional games and so on and we
have lost far many languages in the in
the past we don’t wanna do that again it
has been found out in the research that
kids that grow up in multilingual
environment are more sensible they
understand perspectives more than other
kids and that’s the biggest advantage of
a lot of people that are there are there
are polyglots or multilingual it sort of
know how many here in the audience speak
more than six languages or at least six
languages anyone okay
you’re my hero five languages yeah okay
there’s Sam four three two one all right
I don’t read Italy my friend and this is
this is the beginning of that generation
of that era where people are becoming
more monolingual and that’s the problem
because kids are gonna think in one
language because I’m gonna imagine and
dream in only one language and I think
about myself when I dream I actually
dream in a couple of languages depending
on the situation I dream in couple of
languages and that that’s not gonna
happen to those kids that are growing in
this era because when I step out of my
house
I I found I find kids from different
families they definitely look different
but they speak one language called
English I got a small break between two
jobs and I was thinking how could I do
something what I am passionate about and
my passion being languages I thought I
will do something about endangered
languages or marginalized languages
because that’s something that’s
literally you know not no one is doing
anything about it so I dig dig a little
deeper
to find out the projects that are
supporting endangered languages and I
found a lot of projects actually what
really mesmerized me is that a lot of
people have gone to indigenous language
speakers communities there are remotely
best in different part of the world and
they have managed to record those
languages it wasn’t a easy job because
it’s very difficult to establish
relationship with communities and I
personally first that kind of problem
when I was recording a language called
car B car B is spoken by about four
hundred and ninety thousand people in
Assam and neighboring states in India
and it’s a typical urban language by the
way it has relationship with you know
languages like Burmese money Puri and so
on and this this person who I spoke to
was actually a quite fraud is actually a
quite prominent person in the community
he’s really respected in the community
his written books has done a lot of
research about their language but where
I found very interesting is there was no
digital documentation there was no audio
visual documentation of their language
so when I spoke to her spoke to him I
asked can you sing a song for me a
traditional
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
so something like this I’m so sorry
about it actually I love all this folk
ballads and every yeah I think I do
so that song was beautiful isn’t it he
told me that he can’t sing in the
beginning and over the time between this
negotiation that you kind of heard he
actually managed to sing that song and
that’s a love ballad in their language
and and this this is this this really
saddened me that people have not been
able to understand what what is required
for their language and when I look at
these projects I founded a lot of
resources but I couldn’t find much
resource about how to digitize how to
digitize these languages how digitally
document these languages and I realized
that a lot of people out there like me
would be sourcing for the same very
thing resources to understand the
process because my background is not
linguistics I started engineering and so
I start working on gathering resources
and that kind of shape into this project
called open speaks which is an open and
collaborative project and a community
that has resources in four major
categories first is open methodology the
basics of why digital documentation is
required for languages so it goes about
talking about how you can establish
connection with communities like I’d
like the experiment that I did and so on
the second is open educational resources
these are openly licensed educational
resources that talk about technicalities
the software the hardware how to what
kind of file format you need to save the
content and so on the third is open
source software
a Tamil Wikipedian with a friend created
a software to create spoken dictionary
and I can have forked that on github and
I created a version of my own and I name
it as kitab eden which is part of this
project and that helps record a long
list of words or phrases or sentences
that’s that’s really needed when you’re
creating something like a text-to-speech
and so on so that’s part of that and the
fourth thing is the open datasets so
when you record and you have a file you
have to upload that somewhere you’ll
you’ll normally upload it just with a
name but that’s not enough the Internet
is so huge we need a lot of additional
information especially for a lot of
people indigenous language content are
literally alien languages they won’t
they won’t be able to discover that in
the first place if you just upload that
with a file name there is a need to add
a lot of information translation of the
summary of the content subtitle for
videos and audios and other information
that we call collectively as metadata so
metadata is very important and open
datasets take care of that something
really interesting happened a couple of
months back and I was talking to
National Geographic and they agreed to
support part of the project so so I grew
a small community around this project
and there are about five people right
now some of them actually speak the
indigenous languages and we’re going to
work with two endangered languages from
Orissa called Banda and GABA or good Bo
those two languages are spoken about
spoken by about 8,000 people roughly but
the number is is kind of you know it’s a
statistic so it’s statistics from a
couple of years back the problem with
those two communities is they are
located in such places which are
geopolitically very sensitive and it’s
really difficult for them for many
things in life things are not accessible
in the first place basic amenities are
not accessible and we’re talking about
internet and digital documentation
and so on education does not exist in
its basic form in many places like that
so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna
use these people in our forefront and I
call them citizen archivists they’re
gonna learn from all these resources
available on the website and they’re
gonna translate some of the content
because the content is right now in all
English so the translated content is
gonna help them to learn how did we
detail digitally document languages and
they’re gonna go to those villages talk
to people interview them and record
those interviews sit with them create
translations and metadata that I talked
about and then come back and then we
will upload all those content online
publicly available for everyone under
open licenses I’m going to talk about
open licenses in a little later and a
that’s thus kind of a far dream to have
indigenous language native speakers
interviewing their fellow community
members and that’s a picture from Mexico
a friend of mine who picked that picture
is working with a lot of indigenous
language communities his name is Eddie
Avila and he actually wrote a beautiful
beautiful presentation a couple of
months back and there’s a link over
there he worked with these communities
and help them create Wikipedia projects
for their own languages so as you know
Wikipedia exists in about 300 languages
in the entire world and it’s expanding
but the scope of Wikipedia at this
moment for indigenous languages is
really less so many communities in Latin
America are now gathering there they’re
doing a lot of workshops like the one
over there and they’re learning how to
type in their own languages they’re
learning how to translate content that
exists in different forms and create
Wikipedia articles on in their own
languages so when you create resources
that help communities like that a lot I
want to leave you all with four thoughts
the first one
be eager grab your smartphone or
whatever gadget you have when you hear a
language that is not widely spoken so
you know about the widely spoken
languages we have about 22 languages in
the 8 schedule of India how about the
other languages I talked about 780
languages in the in our country so all
those languages all those 750 plus
languages that are not widely spoken if
you hear any of them then try to record
them that’s number one number two
publish them in an open in an open and
public platform something like YouTube
or SoundCloud or Vimeo or even Wikimedia
Commons which is a sister project of
Wikipedia and is and it’s a it’s an open
project it’s an open and collaborative
platform for anyone to open to upload
content under a free license I’m going
to talk about free license right now and
that’s number three I personally
recommend to use a license called
Creative Commons because by default
everything is copyrighted and everything
is copyrighted by the original author
when you upload that and on a platform
people won’t be able to make use of that
people won’t be able to make copy or
copy of that and your we’re talking
about the indigenous language
communities and they’re their languages
and their content which are otherwise
literally hidden out out there somewhere
people are not going to discover those
that content unless you make them
available under an open license so open
licensing is quite a huge topic I’m not
going to talk about that but Creative
Commons license particularly allows you
allows anyone to make use of your
content to make drive –’tis to make
copies and then and even make commercial
use of that copy and that’s the beauty
of it because you’re allowing people to
use your work and use that for research
and so on and the last one is the most
important one and I talked about that a
little bit before the metadata when
you’re adding information when you’re
adding a lot of information in your
content you’re transcribing when you’re
creating subtitles for the videos and
audios that’s how people are gonna read
a read about those content learn about
so thank you so much for allowing me to
speak to you and thank you the
organizers
[Applause]
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