Imphal, October 24: A group of friends in Manipur has started a crowdfunding drive to build a keyboard that allows typing in the Tangkhul language on smartphones. This keyboard will be available on both iOS and Android operating systems.
A Sino-Tibetan language, Tangkhul is mostly spoken by the Tangkhul Naga tribe in Manipur’s Ukhrul district including a few other places in the Northeast.
The initiative is the brainchild of Ngashanngam Zingyo, from the Halang village, who realized that many young people belonging to the tribe struggle to read and write in the language.
In a bid to promote and preserve Tangkhul, Zingyo, therefore, decided to launch an initiative called Āva̱ramtui, along with six others. Building a smartphone keyboard is part of this initiative.
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“We live in a digital age today where writing is mostly done through digital platforms, with less use of pen and paper. Our team decided to do a project. It is about typing on a keyboard. We don’t have a separate script for the Tangkhul language and instead use English alphabets with two additional letters Ā and A̱. But there are only 26 letters by default in a keyboard…so we decided it would be good to have a keyboard for smartphones with the two additional letters,” the team explained.
To build this keyboard, they have now launched a crowdfunding campaign with a target set of Rs 50,000 to pay the software developers.
