With a cultural motherlode of more than 1,500 Indian languages that spurred Bharatavani, an online Indian Languages platform hosted by the Central Institute for Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysuru, to not only publish content in 121 Indian languages, but work towards starting online classes, the future for Indian languages looks bright.
In a little over a year since its inception, the portal offers 262 unilingual and multilingual dictionaries in 50 Indian languages - all of them in a searchable format on android platforms - which can be accessed on Bharatavani's free Android app.
Bharatavani is not publishing new works, but they are for the first time digitising available dictionaries in smaller languages, to bring it to a wider audience.
Malto-English-Hindi, Odia-Ho, English-Ao and Lepcha-English are some of the dictionaries on offer - most of them available in a searchable format and not as cumbersome PDF files.
Hurdles in Language Portal- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is still in a primitive stage even for major Indian languages. So, constructing digitised databases for smaller languages will be a problem as their script cannot be scanned and converted into text format.
- Another hurdle is that unicode script input drivers are available in only recognised scripts. Incidentally, the Bharatavani portal will soon provide a virtual keyboard, integrating all available Unicode drivers of India languages for users to search for words by typing in language of their choice.
- Another big problem is Proof Reading.
