Digital resources in Ho language | O Foundation (OFDN)

English | Ho*

*The Ho version in Warang Citi alphabet. If you don’t have the font, download a freely-licensed font from here. This write-up first appeared on OpenSpeaks, one of our flagship projects.

The Ho language is native to over 1.4 million people who live mostly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, and West Bengal, and Bangladesh. Though Ho has historically been written in Devanagari, Bengali, Odia, and Latin alphabet, Warang Citi is the most accepted script that was created by Lako Bodra, a community leader from Jharkhand. The language has been identified as a vulnerable language by UNESCO.

Ho written in Warang Citi alphabet:

There is currently an active Wikipedia Incubator project where Ho speakers can create and edit Wikipedia articles. The Ho Wikipedia is yet to go live but with more contributors joining here and contributing encyclopedic content will make this a reality. In general, more content on the Internet is extremely important to share knowledge with the native speakers.

Ho Wikipedian Mangu Purty has created a series of videos to help users to contribute to the Ho Wikipedia Incubator project. (downloadable version here)

1. Part 1: Creating an account on Ho Wikipedia Incubator project

2. Part 2: Settings, Display (downloading & enabling font)

3. Part 3: Input (typing in Warang Citi) and Editing Ho Wikipedia

We did a tutorial earlier to help Ho speakers read any web content typed using Warang Citi in Unicode (a universal writing system encoding).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRfKy8SfL2M&list=PLIglc3FBUWUxVYNK9QQgRAZ1nQdjpqDlE

Resources:

Ho-language textbooks and dictionary (subjects include Mathematics, Biology Science, Kagol, Poetry, Political Science, Sangam Sagam, Science Kaira, Snagam and World History; Text from two publishers — Ho Language Education Council, Odisha and Institute of Ancient Culture and Science Society, Odisha). Bharatvani, Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India
Ho Wikipedia Test Incubator
Ho-language talking dictionary, video of a teacher teaching the Warang Citi alphabet, and other resources by Swarthmore College Laboratory for Endangered Languages Research and Documentation
Warang Citi Unicode chart (particularly useful for typeface designers)
Aksharamukha converter (helps convert Warang Citi↔other writing systems)
Fonts:
- Saning Disum Sans Regular
- BoyoGagraiUnicode Regular
Source code for Input tool to type in Ho (currently used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects)
Education in Ho (schools and colleges)

Bibliography:

Everson, Michael. “Final proposal for encoding the Warang Citi script in the SMP of the UCS“. (2017) n4259-warang-citi_n3668-warang-citi – n4259.pdf. Retrieved September 10, 2017, from http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4259.pdf
Warang Citi. Range: 118A0–118FF. (2017) The Standard, Version 10.0 – U118A0.pdf. Retrieved September 30, 2017, from https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U118A0.pdf

Gratitude:

We want to share our gratitude with Ho-language scholar and technologist Mangu Purty for the video tutorials and some of the other resources links, and students collective “Birbasa” (Veer Birsa Munda Ho Students Union Odisha) for the video tutorial that we created.

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