Report by Aditi Mukund
Karnataka, Aug 25: When we think of India, some of us think of it as a subcontinent, others think of it as a peninsula, and still others might remember it as a land rich with cultures and languages.
Those who remember India as a land rich with cultures and languages, will also know that many Indian languages and scripts are endangered. (Endangered- in danger of vanishing. Species are endangered when there are a very few individuals alive of that species. Languages are endangered when very few people speak, understand, or read/ write them. Languages become extinct too).
One script that is endangered is the Tulu script, also known as Tigalari script. The Tulu people live in the coastal regions of South Karnataka, extending up to North Kerala.
Can you think of at least two people whose mother tongue is Tulu? Two Bollywood actors – Aishwarya Rai and Suniel Shetty, are Tulus.
Software engineers have been trying to make the Tigalari script available on the phones, but the main barrier is that two letters come together in various combinations, due to which there is confusion about which combination is to be used.
In 1991, a group of American software engineers started a company known as ‘Unicode Consortium’, which aimed to create a standard character encoding system. They wanted this system to be compatible across all devices. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns a code to every character and symbol in every language in the world.
Today, UTF-8, or Unicode, has been able to enable scripts other than the Roman script (in which English is written) on devices. You might have noticed the Hindi/ other Indian languages keyboard on your phone, computer, etc. This is because of Unicode.
The first effort to convert the Tulu script to Unicode was made in 2012. In 2020, that proposal was replaced by a new proposal, which was drafted by the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy. This is the current proposal.
Deborah Anderson, the chairperson of Unicode’s Script Ad Hoc group, says that it will take a few years to get the Tulu script on phone.
You can read more about this project on the website of Unicode.org here:https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21019-tulu.pdf
The 2012 project is available here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12203-kannada-tulu.pdf
However, in July 2021, Prahlad Tantry, an independent developer, created a Tulu font which was launched by the Udupi MLA, Shri Raghupathi Bhat.
