If you need to teach someone Bhojpuri, it's in your hands - provided you have a smartphone.

Patna girl Priya Yerunkar, 32, who now lives in Hyderabad, has launched a mobile application - Learn Bhojpuri Quickly - through which one can help learn the language. She launched the mobile application on Monday under the banner of her company, Altergyan.

Interested parties can download the application through Google Playstore or App Store on i-Phones. Priya's mobile application has a set of over 1,600 most-frequently used phrases in the Bhojpuri language apart from flash card, quiz, alphabet, recording among other options.

So what prompted Priya to come up with such an app?

Priya has already launched mobile applications to help learn other languages, like Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Tulu. She said she was inspired to introduce language-based apps as she comes from a multi-lingual family. "I was born into a bilingual family," Priya said. "My father Ramendra Nath, a Patna University teacher of philosophy, spoke to me in Hindi during my childhood. I inherited Punjabi from my mother Kawaljeet Kaur, who is from Punjab. After I got married, I was exposed to two more languages - Gujarati and Marathi. My mother-in-law is a Gujarati and father-in-law a Marathi. I did not have problems communicating in either language, as both are similar to Hindi. A challenge surfaced when I moved to Hyderabad and was exposed to another language - Telugu, which I could not comprehend in any way."

The first help she sought from her neighbour was how to convey to residents that she did not know Telugu. "In Telugu, one says 'Telugu Radu (I don't know Telugu)'," Priya said. "I had done a similar thing while teaching at Mithibai College in Mumbai where my colleagues spoke Marathi. I had sought their help on how to convey to others that I did not know Marathi. One has to say ' Mala Marathi yet nahi'. This way I got to know of language-related difficulties people face when they move from one place to another. That is when I got the idea of launching an app guiding people on how to speak various languages."

Priya, who studied at Mount Carmel High School, Patna, and later Patna Women's College, said that her mobile application - Learn Bhojpuri Quickly - was developed in a smart way. "Like other mobile applications, it also has 38 categories, including travel, food, shopping, household, number among others," Priya said. "The most-used phrases in all these categories would be available once people download the application. The app also has a flash card option in which there is a question. When one turns the card, he/she can see the answer. The flash card option can help one memorise the language. Similarly, there is a quiz option where one can test one's language-learning skills. The answers to the questions have also been made available in the app."