PANJIM: The Central Institute of Indian languages (CIIL), Mysuru and the Goa government have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for promotion of Konkani language and other languages of the region.
This was informed by Union Minister of State for Education Sukanta Majumdar to MP Sadanand Shet Tanavade in the Rajya Sabha.
Replying to Tanavade’s question whether the Union Ministry of Education had launched initiatives or programmes to support and preserve the Konkani language under the National Education Policy (NEP) and through technological advancements, Majumdar said that the policy of the Government of India was to promote all Indian languages including Konkani language. NEP provides, wherever possible, for medium of instruction to be in the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language up to at least Class V and preferably up to Class VIII.
The CIIL, Mysuru works for the promotion of all Indian languages including Scheduled/Non-Scheduled and Classical languages. The CIIL has developed both, speech and text corpora in Konkani language that help in developing speech and text technology in that language.
“This institute also teaches Konkani language in its Regional Language Centre at Pune as a second language to non-native speakers. Under the Linguistic Data Consortium – Indian Languages (LDC-IL) programme, the Gold Standard Konkani Raw Text Corpus, Konkani Raw Speech Corpus and Konkani Sentence Aligned Speech Corpus datasets had been developed and released for public use,” the Minister told Tanavade.