In Kokborok, prologue to a new imprint

NBT is getting ready to publish books in small languages and dialects of India

The NBT will publish children’s books to ‘make mother tongues come alive’.

The National Book Trust is getting the presses ready to publish books in small languages and dialects of India to promote their use and protect them.

Recently, the trust, an autonomous institution under the Union Human Resource Development Ministry, convened a workshop on the Kokborok language of Tripura, with scholars and illustrators invited to participate.

On the basis of the discussions, 10 books in the language will be published, sources told

The Hindu.

Kokborok is the language of the Borok tribe of Tripura, which has a population of about 15 lakh. While Kokborok had a script called Koloma, the Roman and Bengali scripts have been used to write it. The books will be published in the Bengali script.

“We will publish children's books with stories, pictures and illustrations to make such mother tongues come alive for the children of those communities, as it is these children who will take them forward,” said an official not wishing to be named.

The NBT will organise a Bodo workshop soon, and this too will be aimed at identifying what books can be published in the language used by the Bodo community in Assam. The Devanagari script has been generally used for writing the language — one of the 22 scheduled languages of India — since 1963.

The trust has already brought out eight books in dialects used in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh in the Devanagari script.

It has also brought out books — on society, Mahatma Gandhi, children’s themes and so on — in Maithili, a scheduled language of India spoken in north Bihar, and Magahi and Bhojpuri, both dialects used in Bihar. It is also likely to publish books in Vajjika and Angika, two other dialects of Bihar. The script for all these books in mother tongues of different parts of Bihar will be Devanagari.