Media and information literacy resources in Odia

UNESCO considers Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as “an important prerequisite for fostering equitable access to information and knowledge and promoting free, independent and pluralistic media and information systems“. MIL is broadly based on the “information and media in our everyday lives“ and this page lists links to such resources in the Odia language.

The Odia language can be looked at both from a written standpoint (the Standard Odia Written Language) and from the oral perspective (a macrolanguage with over seven distinct languages and many dialects; the total number of speakers of all these sum to about 3,75,21,324 per Indian Census 2011). Language codes: “or” per ISO 639-1, “ori” per ISO 639-2, and “ori” per ISO 639-3. (see a general overview on Wikipedia and linguistic classification on Glottolog).

This article aims at providing a comprehensive list of Media and Information Literacy resources that might be useful for researchers, scholars and all other readers to learn about Odia.

Published text

Odia Wikisource, a free online library with text under some Creative Commons Licenses (mostly Public Domain/CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA Licenses)
Odia Bibhaba, arguably the largest online compendium of Odia text that are scanned mostly by Srujanika who also maintains this portal
Open Access to Oriya Books, a legacy text-digitization collaboration between Srujanika, Pragati Utkal Sangha and National Institute of Technology Rourkela — all organizations based in Odisha, India
Odia.org, a portal that hosts Odia text (both Public Domain and copyrighted) digitized by other individuals/collectives
Internet Archive (for search strings “” and “Odia”)
StoryWeaver, an platform hosted Pratham Books to make children’s literature available
A comprehensive list of language learning resources for Odia

Encyclopedias, lexicons and dictionaries:

Odia Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0) licensed text, all contributed by volunteer editors (see how to contribute, text data dump that can be used for Natural Language Processing and other linguistics research)
Odia Wiktionary
Purnachandra Ordiya Bhashakosha (Odia lexicon published in 1930s)
Tamil Cube’s English-Odia dictionary
Android based apps (Odia dictionary by Twins Education, Mo Abhidhan by Priyabrat Padhy, English-Odia dictionary by TechZ solutions)

Odia newspapers (online publications):

Technical resources

Input tools

Input tools or input methods are used for typing in any language in different platforms. Below are some platform-specific and platform-independent input tools for Odia.

Using TypeOdia, a browser-based input tool that works on Firefox. A mirror version works on all browsers.

Desktop:
- TypeOdia tool by Odia Wikimedia community (on Firefox, Operating System independent)
- SruScript (modified InScript by Srujanika)
- Lekha Odia (Windows based Odia input tool)
- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (for both web and desktop)
- Google Input tool
- Dhwani (iTrans i.e. Transliteration based input)
Browser based:
- Firefox (All Wikipedia supported layouts; InScript, Transliteration, Phonetic and Lekhani)
- Chrome (All Wikipedia supported layouts; InScript, Transliteration, Phonetic and Lekhani)
Android:
- Google Gboard and Google Indic Keyboard
- (by IIT Bombay)
- Indic Keyboard (by SMC)
- SwiftKey (predictive input; shows word options after typing a few characters)
- Swalekh
iOS (input tool for iPad/iPhone):
- Sangam keyboards (supports input with suggestions in 11 languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu)
- Keyboard Oriya (Standalone app for iOS; iPhone and iPad)