The ministry of tribal affairs on Wednesday convened the first meeting of the Working Group on Tribal Languages to draw up a roadmap for documenting, digitally preserving and promoting India’s indigenous languages, with experts calling for a national repository that puts tribal communities at the centre of preservation efforts.
The ministry plans to position Adi Vaani as the National Tribal Language Repository, bringing together linguistic research, dictionaries, primers, speech datasets, recordings and community stories on a common platform. The initiative is intended to consolidate work scattered across institutions, reduce duplication and improve access to resources for researchers, educators and tribal communities.
Adi Vaani, developed by IIT Delhi in collaboration with the ministry, currently supports text translation in nine tribal languages and offers speech-related, optical character recognition (OCR) and video-subtitling features. The ministry will seek details of languages and resources available with working group members before preparing a roadmap in coordination with IIT Delhi. The proposed effort will focus on research, digital documentation, community participation and multilingual education to keep tribal languages in everyday use.
More than 300 primers prepared by Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) are available through its searchable platform. State TRIs have contributed about 13.9 lakh text sentences across 10 languages and nearly 300 hours of speech data. The platform has recorded more than 48,000 Android downloads and around 6,500 monthly users, according to the ministry’s presentation.
