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Welcome to Bahu Bhasa 2025!
Bahu Bhasa 2025 is a three-day event celebrating India’s linguistic diversity through the intersecting perspectives of policy, technology, and community. It will be held from 6 to 8 November 2025 at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and is organized by the Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) and the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), IIIT Hyderabad.
The event seeks to bring together educators, technologists, linguists, researchers, policymakers, and community practitioners to deliberate on the future of Indian languages in the digital era. The event particularly emphasizes low-resource and underrepresented languages, examining their visibility and representation in digital infrastructures and the open knowledge ecosystem.
Background
India’s linguistic diversity has been a defining feature of its democracy since its inception, but it also emerges as a point of reckoning time and again. The last few years alone have seen a renewed interest in Indian languages, whether in terms of strategic investment and growth, or in contention with identities and representation.
While the ‘language debate’ is rich and dates to the pre-independence years, the challenges with everyday, meaningful access and use of Indian languages across sectors, whether education, governance, or technology, persist, and in some cases have only deepened. Despite the presence of a rich linguistic and cultural landscape, growing investment in digitalisation across languages, and considerable efforts in language preservation and revitalisation, critical discussions around Indian languages still seem too few and far between, or mostly confined to silos within academia, policy, or industry.
The unpacking of language as knowledge, as a form of lived culture and embodied experience, is much needed to understand what challenges to its growth and development are today.
- Infrastructural and technological gaps in the development and use of Indian languages are closely informed by policy efforts situated within a rapidly growing and now vastly digital economy.
- The challenges faced by low-resource, underrepresented, endangered, and dying languages need better documentation and strategic approaches to resolution.
- The need for relevant research interventions and updated data in these areas is also a significant knowledge gap in engaging with multilingualism in the Indian subcontinent.
Objective
The primary objective of Bahu Bhasa 2025 is to foster dialogue and collaboration among diverse stakeholders, supporting the sustainable growth of India’s linguistic ecosystems. It is an effort to engage with the current discourse on Indian languages from the perspectives of policy, technology, and community, to bring them into conversation with each other.
A key area of focus within these conversations will be developments related to low-resource and underrepresented languages, especially on the internet and as mediated through digital technologies. This event will also serve as a space to map emerging issues and ongoing work on language documentation, conservation, revitalisation, and development, and identify actionable areas for collaboration.
Bhasa, Not Bhasha
We consciously use Bahu Bhasa (not Bhasha) to challenge the linguistic hierarchy that privileges standardized, script-bound languages with institutional power. Bhasa encompasses oral, tribal, folk, and marginalized language forms - those without scripts, without state recognition, but rich in cultural and human value. This, for us, is an inclusive, democratic, and decolonial stance.
Themes
Policy
The first day will explore the intersections of language policy, education, and governance in the digital era. The sessions will examine how policy frameworks shape linguistic diversity and address barriers to inclusion, focusing on developments across technology, education, and governance. Discussions will delve into how these policies influence the everyday use and accessibility of Indian languages, particularly in digital and institutional spaces. The theme will also reflect on critical questions around linguistic rights, equitable access, and freedom of expression for India’s diverse language communities in an increasingly interconnected world.
Technology
The second day focuses on technological infrastructures for Indian languages. It will address existing gaps in language technology development, such as resource disparities among Indian languages, limitations in localization, and issues of ethical data collection. The event will also showcase ongoing work in Indic language computing, translation systems, and open knowledge projects, demonstrating how collaborative, open-source innovations can strengthen linguistic diversity in the digital age.
Community
The final day foregrounds community-led innovation and knowledge creation. Panels discuss resource-building for low-visibility languages, open knowledge platforms such as Wikimedia projects and Open Street Maps, and participatory approaches to digital language preservation. It will bring together community-led initiatives in language documentation, preservation, and revitalization, emphasizing grassroots action as an essential counterpart to institutional policy and technological development.