[tgb]

The context of the post above certainly making it sounds like Telugu was a dying, rarely-spoken language. If you, like myself, knew nothing about Telugu except the suggestion that it needed preserving, then you'd probably have assumed that too. This brings up the question of why (or whether) Telugu does need preserving if it's so active.

[Pavan_santhosh]

I am a native speaker of Telugu and working to grow digital knowledge resources in the language. So, I am also a Telugu Wikipedian. I would like to present few insights of Telugu speaking world. Telugu, like some other Indian languages, has a lot of colonial influence, especially in the fields of education and knowledge sharing. Telugu Native speakers learn Engineering and Medicine only in English Medium. No college offers a course of Medicine in Telugu, this is true with other Technical, Higher education courses. Majority of Telugu Native speakers educate from their middle or primary school in English Medium. This resulted in a negative phenomenon where you can find virtually no knowledge source about some Scientific and Advanced fields in Telugu. Many Language activists are worried that current generation and upcoming generations are brought up in an environment where they can speak Telugu and can be a doctorate holder but couldn't literally read and write in their native language. But as the language is spoken by millions 74.2 million native speakers, Entertainment (Telugu Film industry is so popular in India), News & Media, Literature, History and some other such fields persist to produce Fiction & Non-fiction works and knowledge base in Telugu. But as I mentioned above, A Scientist, who is a Telugu Native speaker won't publish his works in Telugu and unfortunately, that work even didn't get translated generally into Telugu. Telugu Wikipedia, as a free knowledge collaborative project, helps language in improving one of its biggest knowledge repositories and partly trying to fill this specific gap. I don't know if this context represented well in this article, but this is the context of the story.

[_jgdh]

I don't know how common this phenomenon is in India, but anecdotally, most of the Tamil people I know who graduated from college can barely read and write Tamil. They have no problems speaking it, but they'd struggle to write an essay in Tamil, let alone a thesis. No such problems in English, obviously.

You often hear the concern that regional languages could disappear because most parents would prefer that their kid studied in an English medium school.

[tgb]

Thanks for this information!

[oculusthrift]

sounds like you guys don't want anything preserved. Questioning both the preservation of dying and popular languages.

The whole point of wikipedia is to preserve everything. Especially since people who speak the language are clearly underserved online.

[mcbits]

It sounds to me like they may not see the value in preserving languages (not "anything"), whether widely spoken or not.

I don't see much value in maintaining the regular, daily use of any particular language, but I see tremendous value in preserving the written works (and nowadays spoken audio) of every language. It provides informative data to anyone seeking to understand language, history, and culture, today and in the future.

For the same reason, I support preserving all source code, even from discontinued or unfinished or shitty software. I have no idea what types of analysis might be possible in 500 years, but I don't want to deny them the opportunity to try it.

[tgb]

You misread me: I passed no judgement value on whether it should be preserved I just asked whether it needed preserving.