IIIT Hyderabad is hosting Bahu Bhasa 2025 from 6 – 8 November 2025, a three-day event celebrating India’s linguistic diversity through the lens of policy, technology, and community. The event will bring together academics, technologists, policymakers, open knowledge enthusiasts and community organisations to deliberate on the future of Indian languages in the digital age. A key area of focus is the challenges and opportunities for low-resource and underrepresented languages, covering themes of language documentation, digital preservation, and open knowledge ecosystems. This event will also serve as a space to map emerging issues and ongoing work on digital language conservation, revitalisation and development, and identify actionable areas for collaboration.
Key themes for discussion include:
- Policy: This theme will discuss the role of policy and planning in shaping linguistic diversity and addressing barriers. This includes recent policy developments across sectors such as technology, education and governance, and their impact on everyday use of Indian languages.
- Technology: This theme will explore how digital technologies mediate meaningful access and use of Indian languages, what are existing infrastructural gaps and the impact of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. It will specifically focus on advancements in Indic language computing, localisation and open knowledge projects contributing to the same.
- Community: This theme will unpack language as lived culture and social experiment, through its everyday experiences and creative expression. In addition to a showcase and critical discussion on community-led projects on language documentation, preservation and revitalization, it will also explore ways to foreground community-led work on Indian languages.
This three-day event would comprise a mix of sessions across formats such as roundtable and panel discussions, workshops, demonstrations, and a fireside conversation.
Organised by the Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI), RCTS in collaboration with the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), IIIT Hyderabad.