Creating New Alphabets

May 1, 2010

Scrolling through Omniglot.com for the ten thousandth time, I came across some scripts I’d never seen before. Simon Ager, the sage behind Omniglot, told me they were the work of Dr Prasanna Sree of Andhra University in Andhra Pradesh, India….

She has created scripts for seven hill-tribe languages that currently existed in oral form only: Bagatha, Gadhaba, Jathapu, Konda Dora, Koya, Kuvi, and Parija.

Was this purely a theoretical exercise, I asked, or were any of her scripts actually being adopted for general use?

She replied:

“YES! Slowly, as many of them are now coming to know about the languages devised…there is a an outpouring of oral requests from the community leaders and youth activists from different tribal castes  to suggest the possibilities of composing text books for the primary school children belonging to the tribal communities whose oral language has a script now.

“Nearly 132 tribal volunteers,” she continued, “supervised by 10 motivators are now shouldering the responsibility of teaching these alphabets for general use, in the primary schools, to women of self help groups, adult education centres belonging to nearly 167 villages of the tribal reserves here.

“Self motivated graduate and post graduates, doctors, writers, schoolteachers, lawyers, and retired employees—who were educated in other than tribal languages–are volunteering to teach these alphabets in their respective tribal villages in their spare time.

“Literacy rate is not even 0.2% in the interior reserves,” she explained, “because teachers teach in the state’s popular language known as Telugu which most of these tribals can neither understand nor read or write, hence there are almost no school-going children. For a lifetime, tribals are deprived of education which is supposed to be one of the fundamental rights.”