Language, Culture and Nation

Language, Culture and Nation

It is generally understood that civilizations are sustained by the language, the script, and the traditions which, over the centuries and millenia, become the culture of people. Indian Civilisation has survived on the strength of these factors while Greek or Roman or Maya Civilisations have long since gone behind the curtain of Time. Today India can be proud of its nearly 25 Main Indian Languages, nearly 15 scripts, and over 6000 dialects. It is however, within our hands whether we use such rich and expansive heritage for differentiation leading to disintegration or we emphasize its vast  diversity with underlying common heritage and thus use it towards building indestructible national integration.

In the last three decades the advent of computers in daily lives has brought us on the door steps of a serious question. Would our scripts survive when the computer environment is taking over many other forms of intelligent communications through large-scale use of English as the base language? Taking a clue from the European countries which use different languages but have similar script and a similar Varnamala (Alphabetic order)the CJK Trio (China, Japan and Korea) who have a common Varnamala and similar scripts though different languages, decided to have computer codification that uses their common Vernamala, thus making the information more accessible to one-another. The Arabic countries who also share a common Varnamala, though starting late, are doing reasonably well in the matters of ease of inter-language communication. That leaves the South Asean countries such as India, Srilanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Thailand, Indonasia, who all share a common 4^th Varnamala that is derived from Brahmi. Their scripts can all be considered as offsprings of Brahmi or Nagari scripts and their languages have much commonality with Sanskrit Language. Among these countries India stands out as the largest repository and hence carries the onus of making the necessary progress in Computer communications that will suit well all these scripts and languages. Unfortunately, we have still not awaken to these facts and have made little and confused progress in the direction of a common vision in language computation. 

It is clear that the need and importance of creating, attaching and cultivating a common base for all Nagari scrips on computers has to be properly understood and appreciated. Unfortunately during the eighties and nineties, considerations of commercial secrecy prevailed over all Indian efforts for language-based computation. This resulted in non-standard codification for the computer keyboard as well as storage. The third type of codification in language computation is needed  to decide the fonts of the actual print-out. We need a large range of available font-sets since font-diversity adds to beauty and readability of the printed texts. It is also needed to avoid font-fatigue. However, developing good-looking font-sets requires a combination of calligraphy artists as well as computer programmers. All the language software developers including CDAC from the govt sector advocated their vested interests in using non-standard codes both for font-sets and storage code. This created huge problems of incompatibility among various computer-users in the Regional languages and these problems continue till date. This situation has vastly helped to create and strengthen the feeling that English Language and more so, the Roman Script is the only possible linking script which could be commonly used all over the country.

Historically, during late eighties, CDAC had developed  a standard input code  by the name “INSCRIPT” which had the same input methodology for all Indian Languages and was pleasantly based on the Nagari Varnamala rather than being dependent on Roman Phonetic method. It did not require  much practice to memorize Keyboard. All that was needed was to remember the Varnamala lessons learnt at the age of six, in Standard I. A sample Keyboard is attached herewith, from where it can be seen that the locations of letters KA, KHA, GA, GHA are in close proximity to each other. Similarly, letters of next sequence namely, CHA, CHHA, JA, JHA, are in proximity and so on. This would make the understanding of the Keyboard  very easy and all that would then be needed is a little practice for the fingers to get the hang of the Keyboard lay-out.

This standard for Keyboard lay-out, along with the storage standard was presented to BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) and approved by them in 1991. The keyboard lay out cannot remain secret but the storage code can. The BIS approved standard for storage code was extremely simplistic and hence most effective in terms computer's memory and computation speed. Unfortunately for the sake of commercialization, the same was discarded by CDAC who sold their language-products with a different Storage Code, thus reinforcing the incompatibility among various vendors. 

After the invent of world wide web (www), the internet compatibility became the key issue. The Unicode Consortium adopted BIS standard for Indian scripts, and LINUX ensured availability of INSCRIPT keyboard but at a slow pace. Thus, between 1996 to 2002 we were fixed with a strange situation in which all language-vendors were selling Software Packages with non-standard storage code and hence incompatibile on internet. On the other hand, the BIS Code adopted by Unicode would ensure internet compatibility but LINUX market was still undeveloped. Only a tiny percentage adopted the linux operating system and open office environment, which allowed the user to have the Inscript Keyboard lay out along with a Unicode compatible Storage Standard. The Inscript Software if and when sold by CDAC had ease of learning but was incompatible on internet because of its non-standared storage coding. Most of the Indian Computer-users had microsoft environment which did not offer any solution. Thus to a vast majority of Computer Users, there still remained a problem of having easy keyboard lay-out which also conformed to the unicode storage standard. The situation continued till the microsoft decided to provide unicode compatible Indian Language support but with a cap of only one font per Indian script. Thus for Hindi, they gave a font named Mangal and for Kannad, Bengali, Gujrati,and so on, a font each. However the big damage was already done as a large majority of "educated" computer users who wanted to work with the Regional Languages and also needed internet compatibility adopted the Roman Phonetic Method. 

Now in 2015, we seem to be getting out of the problem of non standardised language software packages which we faced during the 80s and 90s. CDAC is slowly aligning itself to Unicode compatibility but with a loss of all their beautiful font-sets developed earlier which they still want to keep in commercial zone. However, we are now faced with the challange of bringing the "educated" user back from Roman Phonetic method to the Varnamala or inscript method. This is some- what important because this group can provide leadership to the others who had to drop out from education at a lower level. It is pertinent to note that a huge job opportunity lies for those "less educated " if they get trained to type on computer in Indian languages.
It is therefore, necessary to bring an awareness amongst people and the Govt. agencies to make better efforts for adoption and popularization of the Inscript method which, being based on the Nagri Vernamala, is easily accessible for those 70% Indians who were unable to continue their study beyond 8^th Standard. Training them for Regional Language typing on computers by using the Inscript method is itself equal to give them better skill for earning as also the key to build up their confidence in handling computers and thus, ensuring their effective participation in developmwnt of the country. 
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