Aakhar App Launches to Preserve Uttarakhand’s Endangered Languages

A team of volunteers in Dehradun has launched Aakhar, a web and Android dictionary spanning Jaunsari, Garhwali, Kumaoni, Hindi and English. The Times of India reported that each language currently carries the same 77-word starting vocabulary, plus common phrases and quizzes to test what users pick up.

The bigger ambition sits behind that word list. Developers plan artificial intelligence features that translate automatically between all five languages, a task that needs far more raw text than 77 words can supply.

Inside Aakhar’s 77-Word Starting Point

Open the app and every entry lines up the same everyday word in Jaunsari, Garhwali, Kumaoni, Hindi and English side by side. It is a deliberately modest start; the team wanted a working tool live before adding depth.

• 77 everyday words translated across all five languages
• 27 commonly used sentences for daily conversation
• 12 family relationship and kinship terms
• Names of the 12 months on the Hindu calendar
• Built-in quizzes that let users test recall

Neither version demands much beyond a working download. The website runs in any browser, and the Android app installs from the Play Store.

Uttarakhand is far from alone in trying this. UNESCO’s own research counts thousands of languages at risk of disappearing within a generation once children stop learning them at home.

Why Are Three of Uttarakhand’s Languages Already Endangered?

Garhwali and Kumaoni both appear on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, and Jaunsari ranks further still as “definitely endangered,” according to a peer-reviewed survey of Uttarakhand’s local languages. All three still count millions of native speakers, but younger residents increasingly default to Hindi and English, leaving fewer children fluent in what their grandparents spoke at home.

That count is now a decade and a half old, and no fresher official breakdown has replaced it.

Six Volunteers Spent Eighteen Months Building the Word List

Aakhar took shape over roughly a year and a half, built by a six-person team that split the work by language. Urmila Singh, a Jaunsari expert, handled that language’s entries. Rekha Dimri, a Garhwali expert, and Puran Kandpal, a Kumaoni expert, did the same for theirs.

Prithvi Narendra and Saraswati Narendra, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur now working as IT professionals, built the technical side. D P Dimri, an expert in Hindi and English, coordinated the project from start to finish.

Literature reflects the culture and identity of a society, and the survival of a language is closely linked to the preservation of that culture. Many regional languages around the world have gradually disappeared over time and there is a need to protect Uttarakhand’s linguistic traditions. We started this initiative with that objective.

D P Dimri said. Aakhar launched Friday, July 10, at the Dehradun residence of Shri Mahant Devendra Das, spiritual head of the Guru Ram Rai Darbar Sahib, in front of historians, educationists and literary figures who attended.

Can 77 Words Train an AI Translator?

Not yet, and the developers seem to know it. They say artificial intelligence features for automatic translation across all five languages are already in the works, but 77 words per language is a sliver of the text most translation systems need, and Garhwali alone splits into nine recognized dialects that a single word list cannot capture.

Kumaoni carries even more internal variation, with 13 recognized dialects spoken across different valleys. Aakhar’s current entries treat each of the five languages as a single standard form, which is normal for a first release, but it leaves most of that variation outside the app for now.

Machine translation systems typically train on vast collections of paired sentences. Aakhar’s core list runs a few hundred entries across all five languages combined.

Nothing the developers have said suggests that word list is meant to be the training set by itself. It reads more like proof that five very different languages can share one structured format, a necessary step before any larger AI corpus gets built.

Aakhar Follows Two Earlier Pushes to Save Hill Tongues

It is not the first attempt to put Uttarakhand’s hill languages on a screen or into a classroom.

A tool called the Hello Uttarakhand App got there first, aimed at tourists. It translates Garhwali, Kumaoni and Jaunsari into more than 100 foreign languages so visitors who speak none of them can talk to locals. Aakhar aims narrower and slower, at everyday vocabulary for the people who already live there.

Inside government classrooms, the push goes back further. A 2016 pilot from the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) added four hill languages to school curricula across 13 districts, teaching Garhwali, Kumaoni, Jaunsari and a fourth tongue called Rang from Class 1 through Class 10. A separate site, eUttaranchal, hosts basic phrase and script lessons for the same languages online.

India’s National Education Policy of 2020 calls for revitalizing indigenous languages in schools nationwide, though Hindi, English and Sanskrit still dominate most classroom hours in practice.

The Aakhar team says its next step is simpler. Developers plan to expand the word list and refine entries based on feedback from people using the app, with no fixed timeline attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does the Name Aakhar Mean?

Aakhar comes from a Hindi and Pahari word for letter or script. The developers chose it to describe a tool focused on individual words and phrases across five languages, the building blocks a dictionary needs before grammar or literature can follow.

Where Can You Download the Aakhar App?

Aakhar runs as a website that works in any browser and as a separate Android app available through the Play Store. Its developers have not announced an iOS version, so iPhone users currently need the browser version to search the dictionary.

Is Aakhar a Government-Run Project?

No. Aakhar was built by a six-person team of language experts and IT professionals working independently. It launched at the private Dehradun residence of Shri Mahant Devendra Das, a religious leader, with historians and educators as guests, distinct from the state’s 2016 school pilot that ran directly through the education department.

Will Aakhar Get AI-Powered Translation?

Developers say artificial intelligence features for automatic translation between all five languages are already in progress, though they have not given a release date. Future updates depend partly on feedback from early users of the current word list.

Does Aakhar Cover Local Dialects Like Bangani?

Not yet. Bangani, a dialect of Garhwali, has been separately flagged as endangered by India’s Census Directorate, but it does not appear among Aakhar’s five listed languages. That gap shows how much dialect variation still sits outside the app’s initial word list.