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Building Konkani vocabulary, word by word

A team of 60 people have been working on the online dictionary since 2005.

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Can you take a dying language, revive it and make it mainstream again? The Welsh (native language of Wales) could. So can we, believes, Roshan Ramesh Pai, a Bangalore-bred and UK-based IT consultant, who is on a mission to save his native tongue, Konkani. He and his team of 60 volunteers from all over the world have been working on the Konkani Dictionary Project, Savemylanguage.org, which kicked off in Oxford, UK, in 2005.

“It fascinated me that people of Wales could revive their language. They started at the core, beginning with documentation and consolidation. We follow the same process,” Pai said.

Five years since the project started, the online dictionary has 6,000 words. The estimate is that there are 10,000 to 12,000 words in Konkani, the tongue spoken by Konkanis in South Canara. The next batch of 200 words will be added in July.

But will populating an online dictionary actually help the cause of reviving a language?  “There is no point in having a dictionary that sits in a University library gathering dust. The masses need to have access to it, as much as the academics,” says Pai, who is chief editor of the dictionary. Along with words, one can also access proverbs, metaphors, idioms, euphemisms and even research papers on the language.

 “The project has a Facebook application called ‘Konkani Word Of the Day’ which gives users a random Konkani word and its English meaning sourced from this dictionary.  The ‘Google Word of the Day’ application when added to the Google home page gives users a random new Konkani word and its English meaning on the iGoogle home page. Also, the project has its own Facebook page and Orkut group. We tweet on twitter as well,” he says.  What’s more, a Konkani to German dictionary is also available; non-English speaking Europeans too can learn   Konkani.

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