Participants and organizers at the Rising Voices Language-Digital Activism Workshop in Bihar, India, in April 2025. Image via the author. Used with permission.

The online presence of a language is vital for promoting its usage in everyday life. This is something well understood by speakers of Angika, a language spoken in the Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand.

Following a call for participation by Angika Wikimedians and Rising Voices, Angika language speakers and supporters gathered in Bhagalpur, India, on April 28–29, 2025, to explore digital strategies for strengthening Angika's presence online. Guided by eight key strategies — facilitate, multiply, normalize, educate, reclaim, imagine, defend, and protect — Angika speaking participants learned about community-centered approaches to support and revitalize their language in the digital sphere.

Creating a roadmap for digitizing Angika

The two-day workshop in Bhagalpur ran from 10 am to 4 pm each day. The event attracted significant interest, from which 22 participants were selected. In addition to the participants, five language guardians, including veteran Angika writers, were present throughout both days of the workshop.

Workshop participant Sudhir sharing his views on the capacity to practice language rights as an Angika speaker. Image by the author. Used with permission.

Day one began with participants introducing themselves. They discussed their connection to the Angika language and identity, and shared their motivations for supporting Angika. They also stressed the importance of speaking one’s language as a means of strengthening community bonds.

An interactive session on language rights followed, which prompted a range of responses from attendees. Participants ruminated over the decline of Angika as a preferred language for public communication, the lack of educational resources in Angika, and their desire to spearhead a shift in social attitudes by increasing the language's online visibility.

Preceded by an announcement on group expectations, the second half of the day featured an introduction to the UNESCO and Rising Voices toolkit, Digital Initiatives for Indigenous Languages, and its strategies, presented by trainer Amrit Sufi.

Workshop participant Twinkle Rani sharing her roadmap on Day 2. Image by the author.

Day two continued with further training, followed by a roadmap creation activity for each participant. The purpose of this exercise was to help participants visualize the needs of Angika within their specific areas of interest and prepare a pathway for the creation of a solution.

Each participant had unique aspirations for the language — some emphasized the role of music in preserving the language’s culture, others aimed to build apps, while some focused on creating illustrated books for children or language-learning apps. Several others also proposed contributing to Wikimedia projects as a way to support Angika digitally by creating content. Kumar Gaurav, the workshop coordinator contributed significantly to furthering the discussion on next steps.

Follow-up activities

Following the April 2025 workshop, several participants expressed interest in pursuing Angika Wikipedia as a method to enhance the language’s online visibility. Due to the overwhelming amount of interest, organizers arranged for a follow-up online workshop on July 17, 2025, facilitated by Nitesh Gill from Open Knowledge Initiatives at IIIT Hyderabad. Enthusiastic participants joined to learn about different Wikimedia projects, editing Wikipedia articles, and using reliable references. New editors also discussed challenges related to account creation, blocks, and technical difficulties.

The online workshop session began with an intro to Wikipedia, followed by training in both visual and text editing, and concluded with a Q&A session. The next workshop in the series will focus on improving the quality and depth of Wikipedia articles. The goal is to continue these workshops to empower the Angika-speaking community and help them become self-sufficient contributors to digital knowledge platforms.

The April 2025 Rising Voices workshop was well-timed to meet the needs of the Angika community, which is striving to represent itself independently and collaborate in asserting its linguistic and cultural identity.