[Wikiur-l] Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] India, home to the largest spoken languages in the world: A localisation opportunity

[urdu text]

Just to correct a common misconception among western folks, Urdu is not
intelligible to present day Indians. After 1947, the Indian government
change the writing script of the most popular lingua franca (in northern
areas) to Sanskrit and called it Hindi. Consequently, Urdu in India is now
limited to sections of Muslim population.

Urdu, written and spoken, however, is thriving in Pakistan as it is
mandatory part of school education (grades 1-12). Contrary to stats on the
wikipedias about mother tongue, all schooled Pakistanis are proficient in
Urdu. Most of ur.wikipedians hail from Pakistan.

Some folks on http://www.urduweb.org/en/ have done translation (albeit of
poor quality) for some software. You may contact the localization team there
as there might be some interest in the translatewiki project. The
ur.wikipedia volunteers can hardly keep up with the betawiki translation.

2009/10/7 Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org>

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland at xs4all.nl>
> Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:23 AM
> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] India, home to the largest spoken
> languages in the world: A localisation opportunity
> To: wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Cc: translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
> Dear Wikimedians from India.
>
> For those who do not know me, I am a staff member of
> http://translatewiki.net, a project where most of the translation of
> MediaWiki is done. MediaWiki is the software used by all wikis of the
> Wikimedia Foundation. There is more to translatewiki, but I hope you may
> discover that later.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Siebrand Mazeland
> translatewiki.net staff
>
> [1]
>
> http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:MediaWiki_localisation_in_the_50_most_
> spoken_languages
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org
>
>
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