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Central Institute of Indian Languages conducted a Workshop
to prepare Literacy primer I in 12 Naga Languages, at Dimpapur in the
month of Feb - 1994. The languages represented were Rengma, Chang, Konyak,
Sema, Kuki, Chokri, Zeme, Yimchungru, Lotha, Phom, Angami and Sangtam.
The Workshop was organised in collaboration with Directorate of School
education of Nagaland. Two language officers from each language were
deputed by the Nagaland Directorate to write the books. Besides these
writers three artists were also deputed.
There are sixteen major tribes in Nagaland. Each tribe speak their own
mother tongue. Each language is unintelligable to other language, hence
they developed a pidginised language called "Nagamese". Their
state official language is English. Roman script is adopted for orthographic
representation for all languages. Out of twelve primers, ten primers
are produced satisfactorily. Two viz,, Sangtam and Phom needs some revision.
As far as orthography is concerned, we have arranged Roman script as
follows. The capital letters are introduced in the IPCL Primer I. Small
letters will be introduced in IPCL Primer II. The natural mixing up
of capital and small letters will be introduced in Primer III. Before
adopting this system, we looked in to the possibility of following the
model introduced by RRC Nehu for Ao Primers. In that Primer
the capital letters and its equivalent small letters are given side
by side. As literacy aims at recognition of visual form of orthography,
this method might burden the learner and often leads to confusion. Hence
the type of gradation mentioned above is followed.
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