Politicians are again speaking with a forked tongue—this time in Tripura. Chief Minister Manik Saha has put a spanner in the wheel set in motion by 19 communities to shift the script of Kokborok language, which a quarter of the state speaks, from Bengali to Roman. The politician, who regularly tweets in the Roman and Bengali scripts, is rooting for a shift to Devanagari. However, Tipra Motha, BJP ally and the state’s second largest party, is set against it. The matter has come to a head just before election to the autonomous district council covering two-thirds of the state’s area. Leaders must leave the choice of language and script to the people, nurture translations using technology and promote archiving of the dozens of unscripted languages spoken in the Northeast.