Research Projects

The Kokborok Language, spoken by the Borok or Tripuris, is a low-resource tonal language with nine sub-dialects. It is one of the official languages of the state of Tripura along with Bangla, but also a low-resource Indian tribal language. To preserve the mother tongue of natives, the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 requires all mother tongues of respective areas to be preserved. A huge collection of Indian sign Language (IsL) signs is listed on Indiansignlanguage.org, which can be used to teach IsL to Kokborok-spoken people. The design will empower both the Deaf and Kokborok people. However, most IsL signs are double-handed and have links to British sign Language (BsL), making it more difficult than single-handed American sign Language (AsL). The Kokborok language has not yet developed as in AsL, so it is better to implement directly on IsL instead of AsL. This has inspired the creation of a system specifically for IsL users from the Kokborok language point of view. Bengali, another popular language and official language of Tripura, can be translated into Kokborok or English to prepare the repository. Indian researchers have worked on IsL for popular Indian languages, but none have worked on tribal languages of north-eastern India. schools in Tripura and the rest of India are already looking for implementation. The basic idea is to develop a Kokborok repository for IsL for Hearing Impaired People of Tripura, but the same methodology can be applied to other popular but low-resource languages in North-eastern states.