PARI publishes in 15 languages: English, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Chhattisgarhi, Bhojpuri, Assamese and Gujarati. You can read articles in any of those. Of these, five – Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu and Odia – have ‘localised’ sites, that is, home pages where everything including the menus are in that particular language.
Sure, there are giant media corporations that function in up to 40 languages, but those are not on an equal footing. For instance, their Indian language platforms carry a fraction of what you will find on their English sites.
In PARI, we work on the principle: Every Indian Language is Your Language. And this implies parity among tongues. If a piece appears in one language, it is our mandate to see it appears in all 15 that we presently publish in. A mandate we will fulfil regardless of the number of languages we might add to PARI. We are able to do this because of a fantastic translations team. So far, we have worked with over 170 translators – with around 40 of them active in any given month. However, we publish not just translations but also original content in Indian languages.
We believe the promotion of Indian languages is a must for society as a whole. The linguistic richness of this country gave rise to the old saying that, over here, if at every three or four kilometres the water tastes different, well, there’s a different tongue to be heard at every 12-15.
But we cannot be complacent about that anymore. Not at a time when the People’s Linguistic Survey of India tells us that this country, with close to 800 living languages, has witnessed 225 tongues die in the past 50 years. Not at a time when the United Nations claims that 90-95 per cent of the world’s spoken languages will be extinct or seriously endangered by the end of this century. Not at a time when at least one indigenous language is dying every fortnight across the world.
Welcome to PARI’s Language Universe.