FYI: Bridging the Great Hindi-Urdu Divide: The Hamari Boli Initiative

Author:	Azad Qalamdar
Linguistic Field(s):	General Linguistics
Language Family:	Hindustani
FYI Body:	Hello Linguists! This is Azad, CEO of Aazaad Media Foundation, writing to introduce the Hamari Boli Initiative, an open source people-to-people collaboration and language planning enterprise aimed at Hindi-Urdu (the erstwhile Hindustani lingua franca of South Asia and second most spoken language in the world) script, style, status, and lexical reform and modernization. A full-scale Language Planning initiative, HBI's primary objective is to enable--impossible otherwise--and spur open source content production in Hindi-Urdu by resolving the 200 year old Devanagari-Nastaliq digraphia. Strictly phonetic, the ''Aazaad Standard for Hindi-Urdu'' categorically rejects the ongoing arabization of Roman Urdu (as in Ramadan instead of Ramzan). We debuted our Project Wiki recently with 30,000 words and a petition to UN and SAARC governments for adoption of Hindi-Urdu as the seventh official language in collaboration with Stanford Peace Innovation Lab. Essentially, the approach is a global, wiki-based, open source collaboration in areas involving Hamari Boli, i.e. literature, education, Bollywood, digital corpus, software/web-based language tools, etc. People-to-people communication and confidence-building will be bonus effects. Currently in the alpha stage, we're setting up the space and inviting academia, industry, and civil societyfor formal/informal collaboration on various activities and projects under the larger Hamari Boli Initiative. We'll be most obliged and honoured if LINGUIST List readers could consider collaborating on HBI, and we extend a most cordial invitation to grace our Partners' Board. Eagerly looking forward. Best, Azad azad@hamariboli.com http://hamariboli.wikia.com http://www.HamariBoli.com http://peace.hamariboli.com https://www.causes.com/causes/789735-recognition-adoption-of-hindi-urdu-as-the-7th-official-un-language/actions/1674172 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hamari-Boli-Hindi-Urdu-Reinvented/143636665673657 हमारी बोली + ہماری بولی