KARNATAKA :

This is expected to boost the writing of people belonging to Nawayat community from Bhatkal, who use the Persian script to write their unique language ‘Nawaiti’ — a rare language and script.

Karwar :

A 1,000-year-old language is complete only now after a team of software engineers from Mumbai developed three of its characters to crack its Unicode script.

This is expected to boost the writing of people belonging to Nawayat community from Bhatkal, who use the Persian script to write their unique language ‘Nawaiti’ — a rare language and script.

Nawayat is an Indian-Muslim community, which lives in Bhatkal of the Uttara Kannada district.

Mohammed Mohsin Shabandri, a community member, pointed out that due to three missing characters in Unicode fonts, people were not able to write as they pronounced.

“About three years ago, we decided to develop these three characters and called a meeting of Nawaiti-speaking people. After eliciting their opinion and conducting proper research, we finalised three new characters,” he said.

“Nawaiti is an endangered language. Three months ago, we approached a software development firm in Mumbai. After studying the language, they developed phonetic characters and its software, which is called ‘Nawayat language solution’,” he said.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Karnataka / by Arunkumar Huralimath / Express News Service / January 16th, 2019