BHUBANESWAR: Language activist Ganesh Birua is on a mission which he calls the Warang Chiti Project 2030. Belonging to the Ho tribal community from the non-descript Dighiabeda village in Mayurbhanj, the 25-year-old youth wants a world identity for Warang Chiti, a specially designed script for Ho language.
Preservation and propagation of the tribal language has primarily been limited to oral traditions so far. Ganesh is the first youth from his community in the state to take the online route and improve the presence of educational content in Ho language in the digital space.
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He has been developing text, video and audio content in Warang Chiti script to help the language reach a wider audience through social media. In the last three years, he has created images of more than 500 Ho letters along with a word and its closest translation in five other languages - Odia, English, Bengali, Santhali, and Hindi - and uploaded them on social media. He has also collected over a 100 Ho ‘expressive’ words till now.
While Ganesh runs a page on Facebook called ‘Elabu Etona Warang Chiti’ which translates to ‘Let’s Learn Warang Chiti Script’, he also puts up content (words, letters, sentences) on his Instagram handle - ho_language2030 - to teach the language to everyone.
He has also been contributing Ho content to Twitter page - @AsiaLangsOnline - that is a one of its kind platform for Asian language activists to promote and celebrate their language.
“My entire schooling was in Odia despite my mother tongue being Ho. Since we spoke Ho at home, understanding any other language was not easy for me. When I moved out from my village to Baripada for Plus II in 2013, I came to know about the internet and while browsing, I realised that Ho has a dedicated script called Warang Chiti. But there was hardly any educational content in the script”, recalls Ganesh, who has completed his post-graduation from North Odisha University, Baripada.
Realising that there would be many like him who are keen to learn the language and its script but had no online resources, Ganesh began learning the script from a book called ‘Ho Ol Ando: Ho Parao’ by Dr Gangaram Bankira. He started posting content (Ho letters and their translation in English, Odia) on his Facebook page in 2017. But as there was not much visibility, he decided to improve the frequency of the posts and expand the content to Santhali, Hindi and Bengali language for greater traction.
“When I had started out, searching for something in Warang Chiti script was very difficult because none of the digital platforms would support the script. Today, the language at least has a digital script and a mobile keyboard,” he said. A Braille script too has been created in the language by Harris Mowbray, a student of Silicon valley who sought Ganesh’s approval for it in 2021. In 2020, Ganesh started Warang Chiti Project 2030 under which, he will be posting Ho educational content till the year 2030 on all social media platforms.
HO AND ITS LANGUAGE