Project summary

For this project, the Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI) developed and held a week-long orthography workshop for people from the Gawar-Bati and Dameli language groups in Northern Pakistan. The main goals of the workshops were that (1) the participants discover the basic alphabets needed for their language, and (2) that they learn about the benefits of a standardized way of writing their language. To achieve these goals, FLI’s facilitators held an internal preparation session with Dr. Henrik Liljegren from Stockholm University, an expert of these two languages, to prepare for the workshop. The content of the workshop addressed very basic orthography issues. Nine people from two different language communities (Gawar-Bati and Dameli) participated in the workshop. The Dameli group had held a meeting with their language community before coming to the workshop. They were therefore able to share the issues they are facing in developing their orthography. The main outcomes of the workshop can be summarized as follows:

• Participants were able to identify the basic alphabets needed for their language
• Each language team learned about the benefits of a standardized way of writing their language (including script, symbols, and spelling)
• Each language team made progress on writing a report regarding the orthography of their language
• Each language team worked on a proposal for the further development of their orthography and recommendations for how issues in these orthographies could be addressed.