Himachal wants its Pahari language in constitution

The Himachal Pradesh assembly on April 1, Thursday passed a resolution recommending the inclusion of the state’s Pahari language in the constitution.

The resolution, moved by Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, was passed by a voice vote in the house.

‘It’s spoken not only in the state but also in neighbouring states too. It’s rich in literature and its needs to be preserved,’ Dhumal said.

‘The Pahari language is present in 10 local dialects, including Sirmouri, Kulluvi, Kangri and Mahajavi,’ he added.

Full report here Calcuttatube

REVIEW: Dreaming in Hindi

REVIEW
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language
Katherine Russell Rich
Tranquebar
Rs 395
Pp 401

Blurb

Having miraculously survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Katherine Russell Rich spontaneously accepted a free-lance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi.

In this inspirational memoir, Rich documents her experiences in India — ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating — using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. Seamlessly combining Rich’s courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with wideranging reporting, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

Review The Economic Times

Katherine R Rich has a wicked sense of humour and this becomes apparent from the very start of the book. The account of her stay in India brings forth the many Indias, a cauldron that would leave any straight-head American bewildered in no time. But Rich is in no rush to go back. Besieged by the idiosyncratic, passionate, and the argumentative Indian, she takes her time to settle down and belts out her chronicles in lucid chapters—one after another. And she soon begins to see and present India from the prism of Hindustani language.

To an Indian reader, this book offers a mirror, though often not as brutally as did VS Naipaul or Pankaj Mishra in their accounts under similar surroundings. Rich has a subtle touch, and she makes good, timely use of Hindi words to drive home her observations. Not for nothing that the book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s list of ‘Ten most thrilling reads of 2009’.  
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Getting transformed by learning a new language Suite 101.com

Near the start of Dreaming in Hindi, author Katherine Russell Rich says: "I took up with Hindi at a time when it seemed my life had buckled out from under me." In the wake of a bout with cancer and the discovery that her job didn't make her happy any more, Katherine decides to head for Udaipur in India to learn Hindi. She continues: "I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's."

So begins a year long odyssey which is chronicled in Dreaming in Hindi. The book blends the author's memoirs from that period with the latest thinking on linguistics and second language acquisition. An assignment for a magazine starts the ball rolling, and on her return from India she begins taking Hindi lessons. Soon that's not enough and she makes the decision to leave her old life behind and take a course in India.
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Rich encounters Hindu

It so happened that I read this book at a time when I was having to speak five languages on a daily basis. None of them was new; but reading this made me aware of what I was doing. I could almost sense the different brain paths in use, and I was certainly sensible of a different cultural approach to each. It was the best way – and one I could never have planned – to appreciate Rich's experience of learning Hindi from scratch.

Writerly forays

Rich's background is with magazines, not academics. Why she chose to learn Hindi is never clearly spelled out. She'd lost her job, and was recovering from cancer. (She wrote an award-winning book about her battle with “The Red Devil”.) She lied to an editor who'd asked her for some freelance work, saying “I'll be in India,” and was told, “Do something for us there.”

From Delhi, she was sent to an academy in Udaipur which taught foreign students. She arrived at a difficult time: five days before the attacks on New York, and that was followed in short order by the attack on Parliament, then came Godhra and the subsequent carnage. Her magazine background serves her well. She details with painstaking and sometimes painful honesty her reactions to the hatred spewed by fanatics everywhere, the branding of humans by community. There was then a palpable, shimmering unease in the air which she describes elegantly.

The power of Babel

Konkanis are the most multilingual of all Indian ethnic groups, while Hindi-speakers, Tamils and the Bengalis are the most linguistically constrained. 

If we look at which linguistic groups are the most bilingual or trilingual, there are pointers to what drives people to know or learn more than one language in India. For our analysis we looked only at linguistic groups which have a population of a million or more, since smaller groups clearly would almost necessarily have to be multilingual to be able to interact with the wider world.

Of the linguistic groups with millionplus populations, the Konkani speakers were clearly the most multilingual, almost threefourths of them speaking at least two languages and nearly half speaking three. Not surprisingly, given the geographical spread of the Konkanis, Kannada and Marathi were the other languages most of them spoke and English was the third most common subsidiary language among them.

Full report here TOI Crest

Microsoft, Google slug it out in local languages

It’s difficult to say how many in India understand English. But it might be fair to say, as a Microsoft release recently did, that about 95% of the countrys population prefers working in their regional language. That means computing and the web, which is probably 99% English, is largely beyond the vast majority in this country.

This is increasingly being seen now as a huge opportunity. The biggest players in computing are creating applications and tools that make it simple to compute in the local language. For Microsoft, this means it can sell more of its Windows 7 or Office Suite. But as more and more of our activities move to the internet, its a fight with the likes of Google to see who can create the most acceptable applications for local language emailing, messaging, blogging, or social networking.

The attempt is also to help create more local language content. As Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, senior product manager in Google India, says, Unless this content is there, the value of search is diminished. And search, with its associated advertisements, is where Google today makes most of its money.

Full report here Economic Times

Google to focus on language tools for Indian users

Google, the world’s biggest search engine, has been focusing on Indian languages to make internet more relevant for Indian users.

‘Google has launched products like Google SMS search, SMS channels, Google local search and Google map maker and has localized many popular Google applications into Indian languages. It is offering transliteration in 11 Indian languages and seven international languages,’ said Mr Jagjit Chawla, product manager of Google India.

Addressing a press conference here today, Mr Chawla said that Google was the first company which introduced language technologies such as translation and transliteration with the aim of making the internet more accessible to Indian users.

Mr Chawla said that Google has provided the facility that any illiterate mobile phone holder can also search anything on internet using his phone by his voice, if he does not even know Hindi.

Full report here Indlaw News