Agartala, Nov. 28: The Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council has taken an initiative to tone up indigenous language Kokborok by trying to remove "contradictions and anomalies" in its spelling system and searching for a suitable script for it.
The council conducted a five-day workshop, which concluded today, with teachers of Kokborok to standardise its spelling system.
The language officer under the school education department of ADC, Benoy Debbarma said more than 2,000 teachers attended the workshop at the ADC auditorium at Khumlung, where the ADC headquarters is located.
Calcutta-based linguists late Kumud Kundu Chowdhury and Shyam Sundar De had devised a "modified Bengali script" for the language by introducing signs and symbols to express its finer nuances belonging to the generic Tibeto-Burman group in 1973.
Since then, the teaching of the language as a medium of instruction in tribal-dominated languages had started and now tribal students continue their studies exclusively in Kokborok in altogether 918 schools within autonomous district council (ADC) areas and 703 schools outside it.
But over the years, a lot of anomalies and contradictions in the Kokborok spelling system, devised by Kundu Chowdhury and De, have come to the fore. Many written words in the spelling system do not properly reflect the tone and tenor of the language and the workshop was designed to remove the anomalies, Debbarma said.
Kokborok language experts such as Rabindra Kishore Debbarma, Bodhrai Debbarma, C.K. Jamatya and an expert from Pune, B.K. Kelkar, attended the workshop. "The workshop endeavoured to arrive at a consensus over signs and symbols and some letters to be used in Kokborok to correctly express the language," Debbarma said.
However, the debate over Kokborok script continues to rage with a section of its writers and languages using Roman script.
Debbarma said the ADC had organised a workshop last year to collect samples of a new indigenous script for Kokborok by artists and other people interested in the study of the language. "Many samples were submitted and we are preserving them. A number of them have also been sent to a Pune-based language institute but no final decision has been taken," he added.
