PANAJI: Konkani is already beginning to feel like a stranger in its own home, statistics thrown up by the new 2010-11 nation-wide survey of the union human resource development ministry on MOI in schools have indicated.

The Prathistan intends to utilise the fund for undertaking several projects including, providing scholarships to pursue higher education for financially backward students from Konkani speaking communities, digitisation of Konkani literature and developing online repository; integrated documentation of Konkani speaking tribes and communities, development of Speech Corpora (database of speech audio files and text transcriptions)...

New Delhi : The campaign to preserve vernacular mother tongues and make knowledge accessible to students through translation across the linguistic arc has taken a big stride with a new bilingual dictionary series in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada from the source language, English.

Konkani is a language that is spoken by about two million people in the West Coast of India and is written in several scripts such as Devanagiri, Roman, Kannada, Malyalam, Gujarati and Urdu. The use of these scripts has been done for ages and is an important marker for one’s culture and identity, said Rodrigues.

At a time when the controversy over script for Konkani is weighing on its literature, Jagotik Konkani Songhotton (JKS -Global Konkani Organization) is making an earnest effort to facilitate an intellectual discussion by organizing a national seminar on ‘Scripts and Languages of Modern India, with Special Reference to Konkani’ at Kalaangann on March 10 and 11.

Written in Kannada, Devanagari, Malayalam, Arabic and Roman scripts, the challenge for technologists is presenting the same content in multiple scripts. Now, a group of people that includes Wikipedians are fine-tuning a transliteration tool straddling the multiple scripts of Konkani. If the tool succeeds, it can be used for other multiple-script languages such as Kashmiri, Santhali and Chinese.

While there is little or no sense of euphoria about this historical event in this coastal city, historical researchers hail the Goan Liberation as the turning point that gave Konkani language its own distinguishable identity and prevented it from being treated as dialect of Marathi.

Panjim, 26 November 2011: Jagotik Konknni Songhotton (JKS) – Global Konkani Organization – is an organization formed to promote unity among all Konkani people scattered in different regions of India and in different parts of the world by respecting all scripts and dialects of Konkani language.

He further said that India is rich in its linguistic diversity, and though a few languages are said to be on the verge of extinction, a few others are witnessing a revival. Konkani is a powerful language and people should respect their mother tongue as only with mother tongue can one express one's opinion without any hesitation.

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 20: Kerala government has decided to prepare school textbooks in Konkani language to teach Konkani-speaking students, a minor linguistic community in the state.

PANAJI: Citing statistics from the directorate of education, the Forum for Rights of Children (FORCE) has stated that there are 61,241 primary school students wanting to study in the English medium of instruction (MOI) in the state.

Panaji, June 24 (IBNS): Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat was greeted with protests at two public functions in the capital on Friday over his decision of approving English as the Medium of Instruction (MOI).

Panaji, Jun 5: Bharatiya Bhasha Suraksha Mandal (BBSM), which has called for a statewide bandh on June 6, has said that they will protest peacefully and if required would sacrifice their lives to protect Indian languages from facing extinction.

The deadlock over choosing English or regional languages such as Konkani or Marathi as the medium of instruction (Mo) in primary schools has virtually divided the state Congress unit and the ruling coalition parties on religious lines.

However, in Goa, kindergarten is in English, primary-level education in Konkani, middle school in Urdu, Marathi or another language depending on the type of school, and higher education is in English. Students are left confused and best suited to work as hotel waiters or in fields belonging to bhatkars from a higher caste and class.

KOCHI (KERALA), April 18 (Bernama) -- A group of college students in Kerala state will produce a short-film to preserve "Konkani", a dying regional language in south India, reported the Press Trust of India (PTI).