A Multilingual Internet for South Asia 24 May, 2017 The Radisson Hotel, Kathmandu The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers  An ICANN Event A Multilingual Internet for South Asia Udaya Narayana Singh E-mail: unsciil@yahoo.com Chair-Professor, Amity Centre for Linguistic Studies (ACLiS), Amity University Haryana Pachgaon, Gurgaon (India) Neo-Brahmi Panel

The Internet Revolution Managing the World of Web We’re aware how ICANN makes our life simpler on the web where machines are known by a set of numbers? From the World Wide Web in 1989, there have been many milestones – DARPA in 1969 to Electronic Mails ‘71 to the Protocols (TCP/IP) in ‘74, and launch of Netscape & Yahoo in 1994? IE (’95) & Hotmail (‘96), & Google (‘98) changed the game. The Internet Revolution Managing the World of Web Community efforts like Wikipedia (2001) and Social networking sites Facebook (2004) & Twitter (2006) have changed our daily lives. We are here to discuss how ICANN, in its 10th year (2018) could emerge as managing a truly multilingual and multi-scriptal web which will mean even larger traffic flow.

Next Big Net Revolution What will the next big revolution? With 277 million Internet users or 26% population in India and 17.7% in Nepal, Devanagari-based domain names will open a multilingual gateway ensuring a mass participation of users on the web. We are receiving information on how other languages/scripts are advancing in a big way – from Arabic to Chinese. Ideally, South Asia must not lag behind. These web-based services based on our writing systems will alter the ‘Big Picture’ in education, healthcare, finance and services sectors. Since most of our scripts have emerged from Brāhmī, the Generation Panel is rightly called the Neo- Brāhmī Panel. A 4th-5th Century Pallava Inscription from Bujong Valley, Malaysia – showing how Brāhmī had spread far and wide

SPREAD OF BRAHMI IN ASIA

Brāhmī had an Early Divergence Source: Peter T. Daniels & William Bright (1996) The World's Writing Systems, OUP.

Cf. Mahesh Kulkarni’s 2008-Report on ‘Development of Open Type Fonts’ C-DAC Complications Each one of writing system has numerous difficulties because of the way their syllabic structures are captured by the graphics – protruding below, above, and on the aisles as well as through hanging letters. Script Grammar for Indic systems must capture their aesthetics. Only Sindhi uses system – Naskh (linear-seamless) but Kashmiri & Urdu use Nastaliq (Right-to-left plus Top-to-bottom): Nastaaliq Naskh

The big picture of languages is complicated in India

PLOTTING THE 123-ODD LANGUAGES OF NEPAL

The Big Picture Four Major Language Families & a few minor ones India has 22 Constitutional languages, 29 spoken by million plus (E.g Bhili, Gondi, Khasi, Tulu, Mundari, Ho etc), 24 Akademi awards 35 of them publish 3954 newspapers as early as in 1971 122 big languages (10k+ speakers) & 146 in radio networks. Nepal too has many large languages with Nepali as official lg The Big Picture ROM SAN MAN Four Major Language Families & a few minor ones 14 major writing systems in use but 66 scripts in all. 97.7% speak only 20-odd Indo-Aryan & Dravidian languages 2.32% of Indians speak abt 97% of other languages 1576 rationalized mother-tongues & 1796 not yet classified

Multi-scriptality - a reality! One Script for Many Languages Devanagari is used by official languages : Hindi, Marathi, Maithili, Konkani, Nepali, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Bodo, Dogri and Santhali. Many Sindhi & Kashmiri also use Devanagari. The Eastern Brahmi Base (close to Bengali) is used by Assamese, Bangla, & Manipuri. Modi was used primarily by Marathi & Gujarati until 19th century and also by other language speakers. Many Scripts for One Language In contrast, there could also be languages like Konkani written in Roman, Devanagari, Kannada, and Malayalam scripts. Earlier Santali written in Roman, Ol Chiki, Oriya and Bangla. Or, the Bodo used Roman, Devanagari, & Assamese. Modi Script sample

Scripts that Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel is working upon ISO 15924 Code Language ISO 639-3 Code Bengali Beng Assamese – অসমীয়া Asm Bengali – বাংলা Ben Manipuri – মনিপুরি Mni Devanāgarī Deva Bodo – बड़ो Brx Dogri – डोगरी Dgo Hindi – हिन्दी Hin Kashmiri – कॉशुर, Kạ̄šur, Koshur Kas Konkani – कोंकणी, Knn Maithili – मैथिली, মৈথিলী Mai Marathi – मराठी Mar Nepali – नेपाली Npi Sanskrit – संस्कृतम्, संस्कृतावाक् San Santali/Santhali – संथाली Sat Sindhi – सिंधी Snd Gujarati Gujr Gujarati – ગુજરાતી Guj Gurumukhi Guru Punjabi – ਪੰਜਾਬੀ Pan Kannada Knda Kannada – ಕನ್ನಡ Kan Malayalam Mlym Malayalam – മലയാളം Mal Oriya(Odia) Orya Odia – ଓଡ଼ିଆ Ory Tamil Taml Tamil – தமிழ், Tamizh Tam Telugu Telu Telugu – తెలుగు Tel Scripts that Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel is working upon

Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) An IDN could have letters with diacritics, as in German/French. One could choose characters from the Unicode repertoire for registration of IDNs. We are a part of the six ICANN groups working for Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Latin & Devanagari - and we need to take decisions that are of long-term implications. Since DNS understands only Latin characters, hyphens and digits, the IDN is converted to Punycode (sequence of Latin characters, digits and hyphen) before the DNS processing. Let us therefore list out our challenges and concerns here in this meeting. Problems come because the visual variations possible are enormous. Even in Latin, a phished Website – paypa1.com could keep popping up for paypal.com This will be like www.मुद्रा.भारत being phished as www. मुद्गा.भारत So we will have to take all precautions.

Challenges Due To Variations & Complications – e.g. অংক vs অঙ্ক vs অঙক The .भारत Initiative The Government of India had already taken a step forward by acquiring an ccTLD IDN .bharat to make it part of government’s Digital India project. Dr Data will speak more about it An ideal IDN policy would spell out how conveniently an IDN second level name in local languages could be registered and maintained in a hassle free manner – hence the involvement of authorities such as NIXI. That is why the Guiding Principles of ICANN that Dr Sarmad has mentioned There are still many challenges to meet; e.g. Challenges Due To Variations & Complications – e.g. অংক vs অঙ্ক vs অঙক এত [æt̪o] "so much", এ্যাকাডেমী [ækademi] "academy", অ্যামিবা [æmiba] "amoeba" The hardware-software requirements, security issues, 100% uptime reliable services, maintenance of interoperable technical standards, and making it scalable and market-friendly

The Future of Multilingual Web in South Asia Hindi (422m), Bengali (83m), Telugu (75m), Marathi (71m), Tamil (60m), and Nepali (12 m) etc being the most spoken tongues in South Asia, and proficiency in English being negligible, a Web that is only English-based will always be a remote dream. The elites may prefer English, but if more than half of our so many million netizens cannot read the info on the medicines on the web, or cannot see the warnings on the net, or can’t understand government documents, or bank transaction menus, these services would not be reaching them – leaving a large gap. The IDN-enablement will lead to an explosion of Indigeneous languages content. Our research, our creative texts, and our products would then be original and not derivative.  

There are obviously many more issues that need to be resolved when all Brāhmī-based Scripts are to be used for Internationalized Domain Name Registration. Thank you