Digitization of Konkani texts, and their transliteration: An initiative towards preservation of a language culture

Abstract

Konkani is the official language of the state of Goa, located on the western coast of India. This language has faced many political threats such as four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese colonization and contention with Marathi in order to be recognised as the official language, post-Liberation in 1961. It finally entered the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India in 1992. These hardships have diversified the nature of Konkani. It is spoken in several dialects in the state of Goa and elsewhere, and is written in five different scripts, owing to the migration of Konkani people from Goa over the centuries. There are Konkani communities in the neighbouring states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, which are heavily influenced by the dominant local culture. Hence, Konkani is written in Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam and Perso-Arabic scripts. This phenomenon creates a linguistic and literary gap in the community of Konkani speakers. Persistent efforts to bridge the gap have been made, and one of them is by taking the assistance of technology. The World Konkani Centre situated in Mangalore, Karnataka, has developed a transliteration tool, Konkanverter, which transliterates Unicode text between four of the five writing systems of Konkani, namely Devanagari, Roman, Kannada and Malayalam. This paper reports the attempts to digitize, and transliterate an available performance play text in Konkani, from one script to another. It also explores digitization as a way of preserving Konkani texts in multi-script formats.