DU Undergrads Develop App For Offbeat Languages

Vikalp said that,"There are speakers of 80 northeastern languages in Delhi." The questionnaire which contains over 2,600 English word and phrases in English is circulated among native speakers of a language to find the closest equivalents for it.

In September 2013, in what Vikas calls as "rapid vocabulary collection workshop" in about four hours, 2,500 words in Ladakhi were collected and recorded. Speakers of Dhatki, from Sindh region of Pakistan were traced at the South Asian University in Delhi and they took part in the exercise.

Facebook helped Vikalp cross borders and he contacted a speaker of Khowar through the social network.  Email, instant messenger and Whatsapp were also put to use to collect words.

The app is not just another online dictionary. It is having songs, subtitled videos and indicates the geographical spread of a given language. Patel and Shekar worked on geography, culture and politics part of the project and tech team comprised of Patel and Soren. Kumar took the overall responsibility.

Kumar said, "We can go public when we have about five languages." Sukrita is also considering letting future batches of students pick up where the current batch leaves off, enhancing the number of languages in the app.

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