Konkanis have been though a lot. Now Microsoft will give them some LIP!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/07/04 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/04/10034132.aspx

That's right, the Konkani Language Interface Pack for Windows 7 is now available!

By the way, I think "I NAK no Konkani" is kind of a conceptual palindrome, right?. :-)

It requires English resources for fallback, and is only available for 32-bit. It can be downloaded right here.

The Konkani Windows 7 LIP is produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.

A little background information about Konkani:

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 

~4 million

NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:

 कोंकणी 

The Konkani language is spoken widely in the Konkan region consisting of Goa (where it is official language), the southern coastal strip of Maharashtra, coastal Karnataka and Kerala - basically all along the southwestern coast of India. The Konkani community is fragmented due to a tumultuous history, and therefore each region has a distinctive dialect and pronunciation style, vocabulary, and sometimes significant differences in grammar.

FUN FACTS (and LINGUISTIC FACTS, which are fun for me!):

• Goa being a major centre for trade was visited by Arabs, Turks, Summertime, Assyrians, since early times. Thus many Arabic and Persian words infiltrated into Konkani language.
• An international ad campaign by Nike for the 2007 Cricket World Cup featured a Konkani song Rav Patrao Rav as the background theme. It was based on the tune of an older song Bebdo.
• Most linguists have classified Konkani as a member of southern group of Indo-aryan languages, most closely related to Marathi.
• Some linguists, due to factors such as its retaining ergative construction, have classified it as one of the western Indo-Aryan languages, like Gujarati.
• In both Konkani and Gujarati, present indicatives have no gender, which is very much unlike Marathi (this and other examples clarify that the Gujarati influence is much greater than just loan words).
• Though both theories have Konkani in an Indo-Aryan group, it was also influenced by Kannada, a Dravidian language.
• The influence of Kannada on Konkani extends to many linguistic features, from prothetic glides to yes/no question markers to a very similar copula deletion.
• Due to may years under Portuguese rule (where use of local languages by Christians was actively disallowed), Konkani also saw some Portuguese influence.
• With the regular insistence of some that Konkani was merely a dialect of Marathi, it was not until 1975 that it was formally recognized as an independent language, in no small part due to the many features it shared with these other (non-Marathi) languages.
• Even with that recognition, it was not made the official language of Goa until 1987; from there it was made one of the constitutional languages of India in 1992.

CLASSIFICATION:

Konkani, though containing a wealth of Dravidian words, is an Indo-European language. Most lingists place it, like Marathi, to the Southern group of the Indo-Aryan languages, which are part of the Indo-Iranian languages.

SCRIPT:

Konkani does not have its own script and is most commonly written in Devanagari. But in everyday life, a lot of different scripts are used (from Latin to Arabic to Malayalam).

Enjoy!

lady kingdom on 4 Jul 2010 7:17 AM:

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