[smc-discuss] Functional illiterates in their mother tongue

[Anilkumar KV]

From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India
To: Wikimedia India Community list

Hoi,
During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He
did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read
the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference
in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words
that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught
himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.

Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I
met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.

They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
and start reading the literature of their culture.

One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are
part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people
who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and
interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language
communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more
people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
Thanks,
     GerardM
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