The
Central Institute Of Indian Languages (www.ciil.org)
was set up on July 17, 1969. It is located in Mysore, Karnataka, India. It has
seven regional language centers located at Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Lucknow, Mysore,
Patiala, Pune and Solan. Since its inception it is involved in research, training
and materials production in major Indian languages including minor, minority and
tribal languages. It advises and assists both Central and State Governments in
India in the matter of Languages, promotes all Indian languages by creating content
and corpus, documents minor, minority and tribal languages of India, creates situation
conducive to linguistic harmony by teaching 15 Indian languages to non-native
learners. Although the focus of the work at the Institute is on Indian languages
and linguistics, CIIL has projects and faculty interests in number of related
areas like Psychology, Speech Sciences, Education, Folklore, Sociology, Translation,
Comparative literature, Language Technology & Natural Language Processing,
Geography and Statistics.
So
far the Institute has archived data of 118 speech varieties and languages of India;
studied 80 tribal and smaller languages. On the basis of linguistic studies, the
Institute has created materials such as grammar, dictionary, phonetic reader,
report on dialect survey etc.. CIIL has also produced instructional materials,
teachers handbook and video taped teaching/learning materials. It has published
around 496 books, brought out cassette courses in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam,
Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Urdu etc, and also created a corpora of around 3 million
each in Major Indian languages.
Major
endowers at present include creation of online courses in Indian Languages (jointly
with Netaji Subhash Open University, Central Hindi Directorate and Mahatma Gandhi
International Hindi University), Anukriti - a multipurpose data base on translation
and translation studies (uploaded jointly with Sahitya Akademi and National Book
Trust in July 2002 at www.anukriti.net ), LISIndia - a massive data base on Indian
languages (currently being worked on in collaboration with 35 academic institutions),
creation of multilingual multidirectional dictionaries, publication of different
e-journals, bringing out a library of Indian classics in translation through a
project titled Katha-Bharati, setting up an archive of manuscripts of Indian writing
as well as digitization of library resources under its project Bhasha-Bharati,
enhancement of the existing 3 million corpora, and further creation of corpora
in other minor, minority and tribal languages of India. The CIIL grammars are
already available at a special web-site: www.ciilgrammars.org. The audio video
programs are also to be uploaded soon at www.ciilaudiovideo.net.